A small TextWrangler add-on for text-based font data
I’m often dealing with various files FontLab Studio outputs for manual in-depth editing, search and replace etc.
Amongst them:
.afm : Adobe Font Metrics (metrics & kerning information)
.fea : FontLab’s feature definition file (OpenType features+glyph classes)
.flc : FontLab’s glyphs classes (metrics, kerning, OpenType
[EDIT] Adobe has its own BBEdit Codeless Language Module for OpenType feature files, which is better than mine, and it’s available on the AFDKO page. Thanks, Karsten!
To do this, I use for quite a while TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit. TextWrangler is (almost) powerful enough to do what I need, it handles wildcard characters and has some nice web features.
Well, I actually too much enjoyed the flavour of colourful tags when editing css, php, xml or whatever, as well as advanced search and analysis of syntax. I wished I could do the same with other text files I dealt with when I’m not a codemonkey, the way FontLab does colorize its own raw text-based data.
So here it comes: 3 small xml files with a .plist extension that helps TextWrangler handles afm, fea and flc files in a nicer (though not perfect) way.
Be warned, I’m far from being an xml expert so the behaviour might be sometimes weird.
I’m just releasing these with the strong hope that someone could come and make them really working. But they’ll put some colour in your day, I hope!
Installation instruction: Mac OS X only
Put these files in your user’s “library > application support > BBEdit or TexWrangler > Language Modules” folder.