Learn what Font Bakery is for, how it is used at Google Fonts, and how it can help you save time and publish high-quality fonts. Quality Assurance of fonts is a constant requirement for type designers, foundries, and distributors. Everyone has their own workflows to ensure their fonts are in good condition, but often these are fragments and run on individual font files rather than overall projects. Font Bakery is a checking tool that checks overall projects from source to binary font formats and more. The project was initiated by Dave Crossland in 2013 to accelerate the onboarding process for Google Fonts. In 2017, Lasse Fister rewrote it into a modern, modular architecture with a web dashboard suitable for both individuals and large distributors. Font Bakery has checks at three levels: Format specifications, distributor requirements, and custom checks. It now has an active community of contributors from foundries around the world. This workshop introduces Font Bakery, unpacks the opportunity for designers and foundries to collaborate on font quality assurance, and walks everyone through the project participation process to improve each person’s font production and publishing workflows. (Font Bakery is developed with financial support from Google, but is not an official Google product.)
Significant progress has been made on Font Bakery since Crossland presented it as a workshop at ATypI 2018 in Antwerp. Anyone who attended that session will benefit from attending again.