SMufoLib: Where SMuFL meets UFO

SMufoLib is a small Python library designed to aid in font development and scripting specific to the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL). As an extension of the FontParts API, SMufoLib relies on the platform and application independent Unified Font Object (UFO) format and the command line, rather than any particular font editor.

Documentation

SMufoLib’s documentation is available at smufolib.readthedocs.io.

Installation

SMufoLib requires Python 3.10 or later. It is listed in the Python Package Index (PyPI) and can be installed with pip:

$ python -m pip install smufolib

Scripts

SMufoLib comes bundled with several useful scripts for building SMuFL metadata files, calculating engraving defaults from glyphs, importing identification attributes and more.

Scripts may be run either directly from the command line or imported as regular python modules, passing in any arguments in the familiar manner to each platform.

As an example, check for missing or superflous SMuFL anchors and mark discrepant glyphs by running the checkAnchors script with the --mark flag directly from the command line:

$ check-anchors path/to/my/font.ufo --mark

Positional arguments and available options can be listed by running the help command on the script:

$ check-anchors --help

usage: check-anchors [-h] [-F FONTDATA] [-m] [-c COLOR COLOR COLOR COLOR] [-v]
                     font

Find missing or superfluous SMuFL anchors.

positional arguments:
   font                  path to UFO file

options:
   -h, --help           show this help message and exit
   -F FONTDATA, --font-data FONTDATA
                        path to font metadata file (default: <Request '/url/path
                        /to/reference/font/metadata.json' ('/file/path/to/refere
                        nce/font/metadata.json') at 4536666000>)
   -m, --mark           apply defined color values to objects (default: False)
   -c COLOR COLOR COLOR COLOR, --color COLOR COLOR COLOR COLOR
                        list of RGBA color values (default: None)
   -v, --verbose        make output verbose (default: False)

Alternatively, scripts can be imported as modules in Python:

from bin.checkAnchors import checkAnchors

checkAnchors(mark=True)

This imports and executes the script's program function checkAnchors from the script module of the same name.