write-glyphs-file

Stringify and write a .glyphs font file atomically

Converts a Javascript object into a string for use with the .glyphs font format and writes it to disk. Creates directories for you as needed.

Install

npm install --save write-glyphs-file

Usage

const WRITE_GLYPHS = require('write-glyphs-file')
 
WRITE_GLYPHS('my-font.glyphs', { familyName: 'My Font' /* ... */ })
    .then(() => {
        console.log('done writing')
    })

API

writeGlyphsFile(filepath, data, [options])

Returns a Promise that resolves once the file has finished writing.

writeGlyphsFile.sync(filepath, data, [options])

Write the file synchronously, blocking further execution until it’s done.

const WRITE_GLYPHS = require('write-glyphs-file')
 
WRITE_GLYPHS.sync('my-font.glyphs', { familyName: 'My Font' /* ... */ })
console.log('done writing')

options

Type: Object

mode

Type: number
Default: 0o666

Mode used when writing the file.

Implementation Details

The Glyphs font editing software saves fonts to files using the .glyphs extension. The format closely follows the NeXTSTEP “plain text” property list format, an old format that vaguely resembles JSON. For example:

{ "array" = ( "string", "string" ); }

However, the formatting of a .glyphs file is a little more specific than the generic NeXTSTEP specfication. For example, a .glyphs file will contain a familyName key with the name of your font family as its value:

{ familyName = "My Font"; }

Which is equivalent to this Javascript object:

{ familyName: "My Font" }

A standard way of safely stringifying this object to a valid NeXTSTEP property list would be to wrap all keys in quotes:

{ "familyName" = "My Font"; }

However, Glyphs will not find your familyName if its key is quoted like that. To try to output files as close as possible to the original .glyphs files, this package will not quote strings as long as they only contain “word” characters (A-Za-z0-9_).

Similarly, a one-line file can be a valid NeXTSTEP property list as the parsing relies on commas, semicolons, parentheses, and braces. However, Glyphs’ parser seems to break down if a .glyphs file doesn’t also use new lines to break up the text.

write-glyphs-file will write the following as opposed to compressing it on one line:

{
familyName = "My Font";
}

See also

• load-nextstep-plist - Read and parse NeXTSTEP property list files, including the .glyphs font format

Acknowledgements

Stringification is modelled on Chee’s nextstep-plist.

The file writing logic is modelled on Sindre Sorhus’s write-json-file.

License

This software is free to use, modify, and redistribute under a GNU General Public License.