FDBP

Font Development Best Practice documentation

General Info

• The anticipated content of the book can be found in the https://github.com/silnrsi/FDBP/blob/gh-pages/en-US-weightlist.md document.
• Each page is written in GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) and begins with Jekyll front matter which specifies the title, category, weight (page sort order), outline level (similar to the weight, but showing the hierarchy), published status, and layout (page template - bookpage is currently used by all pages).
• The GFM pages are in the en-US folder.
• Some of the current pages are placeholders which need to be filled out and/or replaced by several pages. New pages probably aren’t needed for topics below the top level -- at least not until a higher level page gets too full.

Contributing

To contribute, edit the GitHub Flavored Markdown pages in the en-US folder. This can be done several ways:

• Clone the repo, then edit the files with a text editor and push them. (See [Previewing your changes locally] (https://github.com/silnrsi/FDBP#previewing-your-changes-locally) for previewing the site or consider a markdown editor such as Geany for previewing content)
• Use the GitHub web editor.
• Use prose.io/#silnrsi/FDBP, which provides a GUI-like interface for GFM. You will need to use the prose.io interface to add that service as an authorized app on your GitHub account.

A page can be added by adding a file to the en-US directory.

• Do not use spaces in the file name.
• Copy the front matter (between the triple hyphens) from another file and update the weight, title, and possibly category.
• New pages will generally use a category that’s already in use.
• Add the page title and weight to en-US-weightlist.md.

If you contribute, add your name to AUTHORS.txt.

Previewing your changes locally

To see your working copy of the site served locally in your browser, start a command window, change to the directory containing the repository (using the cd command) and start the jekyll server. For example:

cd /home/hyde/FDBP
jekyll serve

then point your browser at the URL which jekyll prints out (something like http://127.0.0.1:4000/FDBP/, for example). You may be able to substitute 'localhost' for '127.0.0.1' in the URL.

This assumes you have jekyll installed already.

Installing jekyll

Windows: This guide explains how to Easily install Jekyll on Windows
Linux: Install the jekyll package using your package manager, for example on Debian based operating systems

sudo apt-get install jekyll

Ensure that you have jekyll version 2 or later.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge this site is modeled on Design With FontForge on GitHub.