Introducing Horus: online font editor

By Avi Muchnick on August 15, 2007 | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (7)

In our experiments with Raven, our Flex-based vector editor, our programming team needed to find a way to convert fonts into editable outlines. This meant being able to parse True Type Font (TTF) files and read their contents into editable vector graphics. We accomplished this task and realized that this experiment had another very useful application: allowing people to edit and create original font files in their browser (or as a downloadable AIR application).

The best part is that we are now half way to completing the tool, even before we knew we could add it to our suite! The only major hurdle we theoretically have left to putting out a tool like this is to recompile the file with the edited data.

So we can now introduce a new planned tool into our suite of Rich Internet Applications: Horus, a browser based font editor.

We have decided to name the new tool Horus, given the associations of Egyptian hieroglyphics with fonts and writing (and the association of Horus with falcons).



You can see the rough results of our team's Flex experiment into parsing fonts into outlines. (Open a font from the top File menu and then drill down into and enter the glyph folder to select and play with the shapes).



And because Horus shares most of it's code base with Raven, development on one essentially means we are further along with the other as well (which is how we have been developing all of our tools to date).