gistfile1.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

from __future__ import print_function

import collections
import fileinput
import sys

plop = collections.defaultdict(list)

try:
  import fontTools.agl

  def map_character(c):
    try:
      return fontTools.agl.UV2AGL.get(ord(c), c)
    except:
      return c
except ImportError:
  print('WARNING: Package fonttools not found.', file=sys.stderr)
  # Don't have fonttools package.
  # TODO: 5 ---> five etc.
  character_mappings = {
    ' ': 'space',
  }

  def map_character(c):
    return character_mappings.get(c, c)

for word in fileinput.input():
  word = word.strip()
  length = len(word)
  string = ''
  glue = ''
  firstletter = ''

  if length < 6:
    yooniecode = 'uniE602'
  elif length > 11:
    yooniecode = 'uniE600'
  else:
    yooniecode = 'uniE601'
  firstletter = word[0]
  string = ','.join(map(map_character, word[1:]))

  line = '  <Ligature components="' + string + '" glyph="' + yooniecode + '"/>'

  plop[firstletter].append(line)

for ltr in plop:
  print('<LigatureSet glyph="' + ltr + '">')
  print("\n".join(plop[ltr]))
  print('</LigatureSet>' + "\n")

Is it possible to use https://gist.github.com/karlding/c885b91051bd346d93ee 's import xml.dom.minidom to make it such that you can add ligatures to files without even needing to use ttx from Linux? Which can make it pure python?

@DonaldTsang It looks like that replaces my script ligature_xml_to_list.py which goes from a .ttx file to a word list (also linked from my blog post that links to this gist, for reference). You still need the ttx tool to convert .ttf files to/from .ttx. It looks like ttx is itself implemented in Python (and includes instructions for using it on Windows and OS X), so, yes, you could rework this to use its programmatic interface so more of the work happened inside Python.

(Apologies for the slow reply.)

@dperelman it is okay to be slow, slow and steady means the code would be of better quality, right?
Also if I am allowed to make my own proposal I would like to see a custom version of the software that...
replicates http://projectseen.com/ but instead censors the words that I would not like to see.

I have not looked into Project Seen, but, assuming it works the same way, you should be able to just follow the instructions in my blog post. I will probably look into making a pure Python version some time in the next week or so to make it a bit easier.

Please make this into a GitHub repos so people can see how it works, because it has its uses (I hope)

@DonaldTsang I got something messy but working at https://github.com/dperelman/ligature_replacer . All of the work happens inside fontTools in Python.

Basic usage:

./rewrite_ligatures.py SansBullshitSans.ttf --write-word-list words.txt --write-glyphs-json glyphs.json
# edit words.txt
./rewrite_ligatures.py SansBullshitSans.ttf --read-word-list words.txt --read-glyphs-json glyphs.json -o out.ttf

Will read this once I get home. Looks interesting.

Looking more carefully at Project Seen, it actually doesn't work quite the same way. It still uses ligatures, but it defines a separate ligature glyph for each word unlike SansBullshitSans which defines a small number of them and reuses them for words of the approximately the same length. For the "blackout" version of Project Seen it doesn't really matter (although my script will do a poor job of automatically identifying which ligature glyphs to use because it finds them by looking for repeats), but for the versions that leave the text visible, there's actual graphical manipulation involved which is much more complicated. I couldn't find any source code for Project Seen although I assume the author used a script of some sort to generate it from a word list.

the blackout version sounds good enough for me, if the script can detect the length of the combined ligatures that would be useful.