706 stars · Apache-2.0 (read from /blob/main/LICENSE.txt after /blob/main/LICENSE returned 404; stock unmodified text, and the appendix copyright line is left as the template "Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]" — the same fault as entry #2 of the same edition) · v1.1.0 (2025-10-02; the GitHub page shows "02 Oct" with no year and the year was settled TWICE, by the PyPI project page and by the ungh releases mirror — so the newest release is about twelve months old) · Track this in Scout
It runs a long quality checklist against a font file and prints every fault it finds.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
fontbakery is a font quality-assurance tool with hundreds of individual checks, grouped into profiles for different publishers. At 706 stars it is the smallest project in this edition.
What it is good for. A type designer, or a small studio shipping a typeface, or anyone building a web font from an open source family and wanting to know it is well formed before it goes out. It is not a tool for people who only use fonts.
- 706 stars, and it is the reference implementation of a standard almost nobody else publishes. The checks are the ones a major font library actually enforces.
- Apache-2.0, read from the file at
/blob/main/LICENSE.txt, plain unmodified text with no added conditions. - Installs with one
pipcommand and produces a readable report rather than a pass or fail.
- It is slowing down, and its own authors say what replaces it. The last code landed on 4 November 2025, eleven months ago, which is inside the eighteen-month line this report uses — so it is explicitly not being called dead. But fonttools/fontspector, from the same group, describes itself in its own GitHub description as the "successor to fontbakery", is a Rust rewrite, and pushed code on 3 October 2026. 299 open issues against 4 open pull requests says the backlog is not being worked.
- The licence names nobody, the same fault as entry #2: the Apache appendix still reads
Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]. - The install documentation is wrong about its own requirement: the docs say Python 3.6 or newer, and the published package demands 3.9 or newer. One group of checks also needs a third-party binary downloaded by hand and moved into
/usr/local/bin. No memory or disk figure is published.
- fonttools/fonttools
The library underneath, for reading and writing font files; it changes fonts where fontbakery only inspects them.
Track this in Scout - googlefonts/gftools
The build and packaging scripts that sit beside the checks, for preparing a family for publication.
Track this in Scout - googlefonts/fontdiffenator
Compared two versions of a font and reported what moved, but it was archived by its owner on 18 April 2024 and superseded by diffenator2.
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python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate pip install fontbakery fontbakery check-universal MyFont-Regular.ttf
