Is there a way to add support for generating FontLab source files?

Fontlab has a vfb2ufo utility: https://blog.fontlab.com/font-utility/vfb2ufo/.

Rebased on master. Will keep this up to date until it is decided what to do with it :) If it's going to be merged, I'll clean up the commits.

The folder names here weird me out a little bit. What's up with them? They're not dates exactly... but they're also not not dates.

This is one of the impedance mismatches between how Glyphs does layers and how UFO handles them. In Glyphs, glyphs have layers. In UFO, layers have glyphs. This results in slightly different low-level semantics, but glyphsLib translates this losslessly, and only the glyphs in the glyphs/ directory participate in font making. See these layers as extra work space for the designer. The names come from how Glyphs automatically names layers the designer makes. The underscore stuff across the entire UFO package is in-depth defenses against illegal file name characters and different ideas of handling case :)

@cinnamon-msft I just read your roadmap branch changes. Exciting :) One thing that you have to keep in mind currently for planning is that the chosen workflow affects hinting, or rather, what is hinted. Since the design outlines are cubic, TTFs allow only quadratic curves, and VTT works on those quadratic outlines directly, the chosen algorithm for converting the curves and the VTT code are intertwined. Currently, this branch produces different TTFs from what Glyphs outputs (which uses some version of Adobe's AFDKO under the hood), so the existing VTT code is completely broken. This is becomes relevant every time the conversion algorithm changes (be it by changing libraries/compilers or due to newer versions doing things differently -- this has happened before).

Your planning should include either engineering effort to use/match what the AFDKO does or allocate resources for adapting the hinting. I happen to be sitting on code that converts VTT code from old outlines to new ones and I'm allowed to open-source it, but it currently does not handle the new Res* commands and it does not handle TrueType assembly, so composites have to be redone manually.

This is not a problem for OTFs, which can define a small amount of hinting metadata which is used by the AFDKO's psautohint for effortlessly generating hinted fonts.

Note to self: test if new UFO export from Glyphs 2.6.2 is good enough so we don't need glyphsLib here.

As this is subsumed in the #181 update, closing :)