One comment I picked up multiple times while talking/reading about webfonts, is that people are weary about creating WOFF and WOFF2 fonts because it adds so much work. These fonts need to be prepared, tested and validated, will introduce extra risk of broken fonts and cause more support questions. I also get the impression that local tooling, or on-the-fly font generation on a remote server, isn't to be trusted or complicated in usage.
I was wondering if there are any test suites or validation tools that people use now that could be improved, or what the requirements would be such a tool if it doesn't exist for your specific situation. Or examples of how current (command line) tools fudge up things, and how they should be improved.
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If people complain about the extra work that comes with making webfonts then they probably do not have good source fonts to starts with.
FontBakery is the main one, and wraps various others like OTS, HinTak Fontval, etc
If found an interesting thread here on TypeDrawers about testing font outside of Adobe products, and came across web-specific test pages like the Font Testing Page and Webfont Testing. Both tools offer lots of tests that need to be executed by human eyeballs and brains — nothing automatable.
Automation is possible with machine learning and computer vision, Marc Foley had started to work on that
I am organizing a meeting for font distributors and foundries who are using it, or are interested in using it because they face the problems that it aims to solve, in Portland Oregon (USA) on the Thursday August 2nd right before TypeCon. Would anyone here like to join, in person or remotely?
Will a recording or summary be posted afterwards?
I put this up to explain a bit more about what I'm doing here
1. https://github.com/googlefonts/gfregression
This uses BrowserStack to produce visual comparison image GIFs that toggle before/after, and we include this in each github Pull Request (eg https://github.com/google/fonts/pull/1475)You can try it out at http://gf-regression.com
2. https://github.com/googlefonts/fontdiffenator
This is an underlying tool, which uses FontTools to compare fonts "piece by piece". For example, it has been used to ensure the named instances in a VF version of Roboto are all a 1:1 match with the pre-VF files, https://github.com/TypeNetwork/Roboto/issues/4
Currently this is not integrated into the fontbakery dashboard, but will be soon.
Meanwhile, there is another upcoming Font Bakery event at ATypI on 11th September in Antwerp:
https://www.atypi.org/conferences/antwerp-2018/workshops