This may be an unorthodox question, but I'm after some advice on whether RoboFont would be a good solution for an experiment I'm working on in my spare time.

I am currently building a keyboard prototype that incorporates pressure sensors beneath the keys to output different values (through a serial port). I intend to translate this on-screen into a character/glyph of different weights, corresponding to the strength of the hit on the key... Similar in behavior to this project by Andy Clymer: http://vimeo.com/26188365

So far I have solved the hardware problems, but the ability to render fonts using Python seems to be a bigger undertaking than I initially thought.

After reading up on RoboFab, I understand that a combination of GlyphMath and interpolation (using Vanilla) would generate the desired solution. However, I'm slightly confused as to how FontLab fits into the equation, as I have—so far—been unsuccessful in getting a stand-alone build of RoboFab installed on my machine.

Would RoboFont give me the ability to build on these features as a holistic solution? Or would I be better off sticking it out with RoboFab (and its dependencies).

Regards,
Ben

You can use glyph math:

# you will need to have two masters off course
# add the two master glyphs and divide them by 2 
# equal and much safer to multiply by .5;
resultGlyph = (firstGlyph + secondGlyph) * .5

and display the resultGlyph in a vanilla window with a glyphPreview see http://doc.robofont.com/api/mojo/mojo-glyphpreview/

Off course you can do all of this outside RoboFont.

off topic: if you have problems installing RoboFab in FontLab I would redirect you to the RoboFab group, there is already a topic on installing RoboFab in FontLab.

I'm currently having a play around with the Vanilla window (I'm a huge fan of addObserver).

I imagine the next step would be to allow the serial port to modify the glyph geometries between the two master glyphs using glyph math. This will probably take a bit of thinking/tinkering, but I'll let you know how I go!

Thanks again for your help.

Ben

If you have a python package installed in the current python on your local machine, that package will be accessible in RoboFont.

RoboFont is adding the site-packages of the current python to the sys.path.

So if you have a python package that can read from a serial port it must be possible to access that package in RoboFont

good luck!