Way to check for TT/PS outline type in FontLab?

yanone

Hi,

my FontLab under Windows crashes (as in: dies) upon loading a glyph’s TTH program on a glyph that has PS outlines.
But I can’t seem to find a way to query the outline type.

Presence/absence of TT hints, number of off-curve points per segment, contour direction... None seem to be a reliable indicator. g.isContourClockwise() will work a bit, until the contour direction is accidentally wrong.
Whatever is covered under the TRUETYPE-DATA section of the Unofficial FontLab/Python API Reference returns identical values for both types.

Any ideas? Thank you.

yanone

Found FontLab's mistake, although it's a bit hard to believe:
It crashed on a line querying the existence of a glyph object in a variable that was None beforehand.
This works: if self.sourcePSglyph != None:
This doesn't: if self.sourcePSglyph:

But the question above remains interesting.

Matthew Butterick

It may indeed be a FL error. But those two tests are not the same in Python.

See http://stackoverflow.com/a/28067

Paul van der Laan

FYI, the same crash occurs if you check for the existence of data in the FL mask layer:

if g.naked().mask:   # BOOM!
if g.naked().mask != None:   # this works

Matthew is correct about the difference between these two tests, but it does not explain why FL unexpectedly quits in this case.