Can you offer a more detailed example of your requirements?

Tried http://code.google.com/p/sfntly/
?

Are you experimenting with parametric design?

It appears that it becomes more and more undervalued these days.

Judging by some recent discussions I have seen on the matter I think most people would like to see an easier way of working natively with quadratic beziers for drawing, and a more straightforward approach to working natively with TrueType would benefit everyone working with fonts. There still seems to be a significant amount of misunderstanding and even suspicion about the TrueType format even in the type community, which is worrying.

UFO and RoboFont ended this kind of discussion, I thought?

Entirely possible that I am looking at this the wrong way but below are the text results of the same glyph data as taken from a TrueType file decomposed in TTX and then the same taken from the UFO file [EDIT] (generated with FontForge as I do not currently have access to RoboFont):

TTX:

<TTGlyph name="A" xMin="50" yMin="0" xMax="1698" yMax="1648">
<contour>
<pt x="50" y="1648" on="1"/>
<pt x="1698" y="1648" on="1"/>
<pt x="1698" y="0" on="1"/>
<pt x="50" y="0" on="1"/>
</contour>
<instructions><assembly>
</assembly></instructions>
</TTGlyph>

UFO:

<glyph name="A" format="1">
<advance width="1748"/>
<unicode hex="0041"/>
<outline>
<contour>
<point x="50" y="1648" type="line" smooth="no"/>
<point x="1698" y="1648" type="line" smooth="no"/>
<point x="1698" y="0" type="line" smooth="no"/>
<point x="50" y="0" type="line" smooth="no"/>
</contour>
</outline>
</glyph>

Grzegorz, is the second set of data any easier to parse?

Both TTX and UFO would be same easy or same hard to parse if you like. I just wouldn’t consider UFO a mature format, particularly not a format that would be closely tied to any of the target technologies in the industry, i.e., either PostScript or TrueType. It’s the lowest common denominator between the two and while this can be useful in an early work environment, it makes it bad for fine-tuning and storage.

In fact, TTX would be more adequate for the job, but it’s still a bulky XML/Python combo and the tool itself appears not to be maintained any more. I haven’t had any access to Microsoft’s software lately, so I can’t tell nothing about TTFDump.

There appears to be a FontForge specific utility called ShowTTF but I am not sure how to make it work with my Mac installation of FontForge.

TeX Live’s ttfdump, is a different utility not related to Microsoft one, and it only dumps TTf files (the tables it understands), but can not compile them back.

Thank you, Khaled. The Google searches were getting increasingly confusing!

I think it's worth mentioning that FontForge's format, ".sfd", is plain-text. And FontForge's author also wrote some tools to do diff and merge for .sfd files. Even without the extra utilities, it goes well with Git and diff and is fairly human readable.

However, I don't think converting a font to .sfd and back will generate exactly the same thing...

…in essence TrueType font outlines are points, connected with lines. It's hard to describe that in any "easy readable" way.

Thing is, the way those points are stored in the 'glyf' table is for space efficiency and machine performance. For example, points for all contours are listed together and coordinates of both axes are separated into two different arrays with the bounding box cached up front. Human-readable representation I’m thinking of would just make those lists more sanely structured and formatted, and any redundant data or bytecode-related flags would be derived by the compiler. See:

glyph id simpletype

	instructions
		INSTRUCTIONS

	contour
		point on/offcurve x y
		point on/offcurve x y
		...

	contour
		...

glyph id compoundtype

	instructions
		INSTRUCTIONS

	component id x y transformation round
	component id x y transformation round
	...
...

Nothing fancy, just a file that could be read like code and edited by hand if necessary. FontForge’s .sfd in some skinnier form could do, but a one-to-one recompilation would be uncertain indeed. Thanks for mentioning FontForge’s little utilities, I didn’t know they even exist.