Is there a list of OpenType font feature inspection tools available? I'm interested in programs for various platforms and/or online apps, either with a GUI or on the command line. Optimally, I'm looking for a wiki page that holds all this information.
Essentially, the tools I'm interested in should report what scripts and languages a given font supports, and what features are available (ideally showing some examples).
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https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/blob/master/OTFontFileVal/OTLVal.cs
But I am not sure which tests use this - probably gpos and gsub? Anyway, it does the LangSys Script and FeatureList tables.
Werner, any OpenType tool and library worth its disk space can report the lists you mention. For those lists you don't even need a dedicated library either -- all you need is being able to parse the basic 'sfnt' table structure, and the data you are looking for is pretty much right at the start of both GSUB and GPOS. It's all in the specifications.
Showing a relevant example (as what, an image?) is more complex, because you'd need to parse the actual lookup data so you can tell what glyphs get processed.
Would you be interested in samples of 'the usual' only, or would you require actual examples of Arabic justification, Hindi halants reordering, Urdu slanted typesetting, and Vietnamese stacked accents as well? [Disclaimer: a random list from memory, I don't actually know what any of these phrases mean.]
This is part of the output of a fun program I recently wrote in plain C, using a GSUB parser of my own design and FreeType2 for the character rendering:
Does freetype itself not do that, or don't care enough about these to let harfbuzz provides these?
This lists all scripts, languages, and features in a supplied font file with the usual abbreviated tags, like this:
These are rather extensive lists, but all can be found on the canonical OpenType specification site maintained by Microsoft. The list of features, for example, is at https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm.
The current (2017) list of languages is a whopping 600 items long, there are about 150 scripts, and the list of possible features is so long it gets spread over several web pages ... All in all, although adding the Friendly Forms into the existing script should be trivial, I'm going to have that slide for to-night – it's past 1:30 over here
By and large, it would be a command line program and provide a list such as the above, with the longer descriptions.
Would that be something you are looking for? It still requires the skills to install Python and the library itself, but that should be covered in any beginners' guide.
TrueType Viewer (free) http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/truetypeviewer.html
'TrueType viewer', alas, is unmaintained since many years. And I agree that DTL OTMaster is a bit heavy for a simple inspection of features.
The helpID starting with "I" are such :
https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/blob/master/GenerateFValData/OurData.xml
Currently there are 36 of those, out of over 900. About 300 starts with P (passed). Another option is to append to the "Details" field of a Passed item... The rest of 600 is W/E.
Another web tool is http://www.alphabet-type.com/tools/charset-checker/ but it may be too complex for the casual user.
Do you think it would be useful to add this info (which it already parses and kept internally for further analysis) to the output? That's assuming this additional info is not an overwhelming amount of new output swarming the rest of the usual output one expects from font validator...
Yes, the full output is only of interests to some specific professionals. But the current "unselect everything" output is about the same as what "ttx -l ..." does, and is mostly generally useful as a first look, and not particularly slow.
For most cases → OTM
For rare cases → otfccdump + read the JSON
For building typefaces → directly write JSON + otfccbuild