As the name indicates, hTools3 is the 3rd iteration of hTools.

hTools

hTools started in 2005/06 while I was still a student at TypeMedia. We all used FontLab Studio 5 at the time. At first, hTools was just the name of a folder where I started to collect RoboFab scripts while working and studying. At some point I learned how to create modules, and the hTools folder became a Python module from which I could import things. That was super useful, so I kept working on making it better.

This first version of hTools was never made public. The name of the module was inspired by the naming scheme used in RoboFab, with a letter prefix for object names (ex: RFont, RGlyph, etc). The H in hTools stands for Hipertipo, as the tools were originally intended for my personal use only.

hTools2

RoboFont 1 was released in September 2011. I switched to it right away, and began (re)writing small tools which I needed for my work. A first version of hTools2 was made available under an open-source license in December. Nikola Djurek of Typonine commissioned me to create new tools and scripts which were added to the toolkit. The following year I was invited to make a presentation about hTools2 at the RoboThon conference – this motivated me to improve the code and write some documentation for users.

Over the next years, I continued to use hTools2 extensively in my own type design work, and kept adding new features as I needed them. Some designers and foundries (Typonine, Underware, Dinamo) funded the development of individual new tools, others made donations to support the project (Klim, Blackletra). I also received several contributions in the form of pull requests, bug reports and issues. A big thanks to everyone who contributed to hTools2!

hTools3

RoboFont 3 was released in July 2018. It introduced two big changes: switch from Python 2 to Python 3, and switch from the RoboFab API to the FontParts API. Most existing RF1 tools required small changes to work on RF3. I started making changes to hTools2 code in order to make it compatible with RF3, while still keeping it backwards-compatible with RF1. This involved adding a lot of conditionals to check for the current version – it worked, but the code became ugly and hard to maintain. At this point I decided to start over and work on a new future-oriented version of hTools, dropping support for RF1. The hTools2 code was declared ‘frozen’ and hTools3 development was initiated.

Nikola Djurek (now of Typotheque) contributed greatly to the initial work on hTools3. In a meeting at the KABK during the RoboThon conference in 2018, we made a long list of tools which should be included in the kit. Most font and glyphs tools were based on existing hTools2 tools, while the batch tools were all created from scratch using a new accordion-based interface. Nikola/Typotheque funded initial development and provided helpful testing and feedback.

I continued to work on hTools3 independently, improving the code and adding new tools as I needed them. A new set of glyph tools was included, containing tools to display special kinds of data while drawing – distances, angles, curvatures, etc. A lot of time was dedicated to making the code clear and maintainable, and to writing documentation. There are now two separate docs for hTools3: a high-level user documentation and a low-level API documentation for developers. Both docs are built automatically from the source code and are served through GitLab Pages.

A beta version of hTools3 was made public in March 2020 as a compiled trial extension. The trial extension period, which was initially set for 3 months, was extended until the end of the year. Version 0.6.0, released on 31/12/2020, marked the start of the commercial distribution of hTools3. Huge thanks to all users who bought a license!