# pens: Inspect and manipulate glyph outlines

### Overview:

The fontTools pens are a collection of classes that can operate on a font glyph via the points and the contours of the glyph’s outlines.

Some pens trace through the outlines and generate graphical output, such as a new glyph outline or a formatted image, but other pens analyze the outlines and return information about the glyph.

Pens that alter or produce a pen-compatible `ttGlyph` object can be chained together.

New pens can be written by sub-classing the `AbstractPen` or, somewhat more practically, `BasePen` classes. The Pen Protocol is documented on the basePen page.

### Pen modules:

- areaPen
- basePen
- boundsPen
- cocoaPen
- cu2quPen
- filterPen
- freetypePen
- momentsPen
- perimeterPen
- pointInsidePen
- pointPen
- qtPen
- recordingPen
- reportLabPen
- reverseContourPen
- roundingPen
- statisticsPen
- svgPathPen
- t2CharStringPen
- teePen
- transformPen
- ttGlyphPen
- wxPen