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It's just that the python library used won't read SVG from a string, online from a file given a filename, so each character must be written to disk, then read back in.

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Wow. To me that's definitely in the realm of "fix this if you need to run this program more than once" inefficiency. After looking at the implementation, it doesn't seem like it takes advantage of TTF's "composite glyphs" feature either, which would be the most straightforward way of generating a font like this --- once you define the box and the digit glyphs, each character is then composed entirely of references to the box and the appropriate digit glyphs.

Yeah I tried looking to see how much I would need to change to fix it, but I'm not too great in C which is what fontforge was written in.

Oh man I gotta look into the composite glyphs. I don't know much about fonts in general. Thanks for this bit of information.

>To me that's definitely in the realm of "fix this if you need to run this program more than once"

Maybe the programmer doesn't need to use this more than once?

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