(I think this deserves its own post thread!)
I wrote before Christmas that I was making the font validator run standalone as mac os X command line binary, no need to install mono separately. So it comes.
There is a FontVal-MacOSX-*.tgz under
(current 2016-01-06):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hp-pxl-jetready/files/Microsoft Font Validator/ If you have an up to date freetype (from macport/homebrew, Xquartz[?], or built your own), you just run it plain. If you have a vanilla mac os X box without any of those, you set DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to where you unpack the "Darwin" subdirectory - there are just 3 files, the binary, and a subdirectory of up to date freetype dylib, and libpng (which freetype depends on), which you don't have to use.
It is mainly tested on Mavericks, so I'd like to hear from people trying on Yosemite and El Capitan.
I am having problems making the GUI run standalone on Mac os X without mono. More details about this later.
Please feel free to click
http://sourceforge.net/p/hp-pxl-jetready/donate/
Comments
That said, I know it may seem overly basic, but you need to provide truly step by step instructions so that the average Mac user who has never set a path variable in their life will be able to follow it. Probably half the potential audience for this tool doesn't know how to do that.
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=<someplace>/Darwin <someplace>/FontValidator
Instead of
<someplace>/FontValidator
Where "<someplace>" is the unpacked folder somewhere under /Users/Hintak or Desktop .
There are more persistent ways of doing this ("export ..." per session or editing .bashrc - permanent) but I won't go into details. Just prepending is easy enough.
Trying to make the GUI native is suffering from the mac os X version of DLL hell at the moment. Apple ships a hardware-accelerated libJPEG in Core.Graphics ; mono's interpreter/VM depends on Core.Foundation (which includes Core.Graphics), while the GUI layer has its own private vanilla libJPEG . The application gets a bit confused about which copy of libJPEG to load and in what code path if one tries to build and bundle it all together...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hp-pxl-jetready/files/Microsoft Font Validator/
You just download, double click to open the disk image, which contains exactly one icon to click. You double-click that, it launches the GUI !
I feel that I should get some donation on this, so please do make one (
http://sourceforge.net/p/hp-pxl-jetready/donate/) if you find this neat .
- you could option-drag the whole volume to /Applications (there are invisible items in the volume) if you don't want to unpack the disk image all the time.
- most likely you should go into report options to write report to font location or your choice, since the default of immediate viewing with built-in viewer does not work currently yet.
- if your box had never had any other fontconfig-based (basically any Unix-GUI) application installed, the first time you run the GUI there is possibly a substantial delay to build the font cache. This should happen only once until you have a major OS upgrade (when your collection of system fonts changes).
When you click on the icon it is supposed to open a terminal which says something about "... /FontVal ; exit" . It may take a while before the GUI appear (during the font cache build)- do not close the terminal. When it finishes (or fails) it will says "process completed" or something.
Micah
I don't want to go into details on running it under wine, but I actually keep three wine installs, vanilla wine (I.e. Wine + wine-mono), wine + donet 2 ( i.e. + gecko) and wine + donet 2 + ie 8 for testing.
Ie 7 and ie 6 does not work correctly under wine; nor wine-mono enough for running the xml viewer.
I haven't gotten round to file those bugs at wine's bugzilla - it is on my TODO list. There are, as I said, at least 3/4 of those: wine-mono does not work (vs donet 2), ie 6, ie 7 does not work (vs ie 8), etc.
The wine people had done a terrific job in the last 15+ years, but the MSIE Active X control (used by the xml viewer code) is one part they have not quite conquer.
You can change the location of the reports in the menu Validation>Options to a directory of your choice or the same directory as the fonts you're validating.
I found it also helps to uncheck the option to display the results immediately after validation, since it can't do that yet anyway. This way you eliminate the inevitable error message you otherwise have to dismiss each time a report is finished.
The reports can be viewed in any web browser.