Spiro is a toolkit for curve design, especially font design, created by Raph Levien. It is a smooth alternative to the wide known Bézier curves… It is VERY impressive using.

Dave Crossland and Nicolas Spalinger (OFL – Fontly) demoed a chain of process: a script that takes a scanned sample of fonts, contrast it, then recognises and chops automaticaly the glyphs, and import them as background for Spiro PPEDIT application. You can then use the spiro to draw the outlines, in an easier and smoother way than beziers (and reducing the amount of points). Automatisation of the work process is a terrible gain of time, and made me dream the whole night. The spiros curves are accepted by Fontforge, and tranformed as editable beziers curves… On linux systems, files produced by ppedit are immediately send to the famous font editor…

levien.com/spiro

A MacOs version has just been released: enjoy the incredible souplesse of the curves manipulation. The tensions angles seems to be very automatised – and are difficult to stress, but I hardly tryed it… You can’t save the curves done… yet. Some more info will be released this week!