Importing vector files from Robofont to Affinity Designer

[LisaHUANG]

Hello, I'm working on glyphs drawn first using Robofont, which is a type design app. Each letters and characters are displayed as Bezier curves, which are in the app text files. I could copy paste shapes from Robofont directly into Illustrator and it keeps the shapes as vectors, but once I copy and paste the vectors from Robofont into Affinity Designer, it seems to turn the curves into text informations that I can't do anything with... Is there a way to make this work? Thank you for your help

[gdenby]

Hi, LisaHUANG,

I did some quick reading. Here is my guess at what is happening. Robofont is generating characters from human readable text, following the UFO standard. This is a good thing. To use a trivial example, HTML can be written w. a simple text processor, and displayed as a web page. A UFO font is a much more complex format, but still based on text that can be edited with the most common text tools. But it relies on the text being rendered by an app that converts the text to a screen or print item. In a similar manner, imagine trying to display a contemporary web page in a browser from years ago. the app doesn't recognize the new features.

 I see Adobe has been working on support for this format for several years. While what you see as a glyph on the Robofont screen made of Bezier curves, what underlies that is a mass of text. My guess is that Illustrator has a way to render the underlying text, but AD does not. When you copy the glyph, AD can only display the descriptive text.

From my quick reading, Robofont can export the created fonts in formats AD does handle with its text tools. The characters might then be converted back into curve objects for more shaping. At this point, I don't know what external formats for import of curves Robofont has.

[LisaHUANG]

Hi gdenby,

Thanks for your reply. I understand that this feature is not solved in AD yet because it's a young app. Robofont can export several file formats:
- ufo for Robofont source file
- otf, ttf, postscript... for generated typeface files
- test install, that is a temporary file that can be used to test a typeface without generating anything

So far I'm using the test install thing on AD, and then, as you mentionned, turned the letterforms into curves. It would be great if this can be solved as in Illustrator for a next update