Hey all. My name's Simon, and I'm a freelance font engineer and typographic developer. I do this because I believe everyone should be able to express themselves, in print and online, in their chosen language and script. So I'm passionate about getting computers to handle different languages and alphabets correctly, and about enabling people who are working with complex texts.

Things I do

I'm the creator and one of the developers of the SILE typesetter, a typesetting system with an emphasis on global scripts. I've created a number of plugins and scripts for the Glyphs font editor. I also occasionally contribute to some of the open source projects which enable font engineering and layout, such as fonttools, fontParts, and harfbuzz. I'm currently exploring new techniques for web typography with variable fonts.

I'm also a writer, and I believe documentation is the key to enabling other people. The more people who understand how all of these tools work, the more people can be involved in meeting the needs of complex text processing. Because of that, I'm writing an open-source book about designing fonts for global scripts and getting computers to display them properly.

What your sponsorship means to me

• Encouragement. When I know that what I'm doing is useful and appreciated, I do more of it! So if you want to see more of all of the above, let me know with a sponsorship!
• Direction. Do you have specific languages or scripts you'd like to see supported in SILE? Are there questions you have about font development? I want to help everyone as much as I can, but sponsorship helps me to prioritize.
• Food. I mean, seriously. People gotta eat.