Old MS FontVal reports to spare, or computer time to make new ones?

Hin-Tak Leung
Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 361
edited July 2016 in Type Design Software

Anybody have a stash of old MS FontVal reports (and the actual versions of font accompanying them), or can spare a few days of computer time running the older 2003 FontVal on say, current shipping Mac OS X system fonts or current linux systems?

A new version of the updated FontVal will be out soon. It will come with an implementation of rasterisation tests, which detects truetype hinting errors. It detects 6 types of hinting errors (out of about 70). That was helped by collecting the reports last summer on win 8.1 shipped fonts (and they only shows 7 kinds of errors, one of which is bogus and due to bug in the 2003 FontVal).

Specifically, I am looking for reports (and the accompanying possibly buggy fonts) which shows rasterisation errors/warnings beyond these 7:

warnings:
Instruction is only valid on the Apple platform
Projection and freedom vectors at or near perpendicular

errors:
Instruction already defined by rasterizer
Not called from pre-program
Point out of range
RP1 and RP2 have the same position on the projection vector
X and Y components of vector are invalid. X^2 + Y^2 != 0x4000^2


@Dave Crossland @Cosimo Lupo - do you have the computer time to spare? Does not require skills or manual time, just running the 2003 binary on Mac os X or Linux shipping fonts, and send me the reports afterwards. Reports on win10 shipping fonts are less interesting, unless they show errors beyond the 7 above (unlikely, newer version of fonts unlikely to show novel errors).

!! Note that it took about 5 days last summer to run the 2003 binary on win 8.1 fonts (only 270? of them), on windows. Apple ships about 460?, and the typical linux box ships 1700 fonts the last time I counted. While the 2003 binary runs in wine (requires genuine dotnet runtime and not the default wine-mono), it is about 4x slower under wine compared to running natively on windows. So we are talking about ~weeks of CPU time to spare.

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Comments

  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 361
    I only mentioned mac os x or Linux shipping fonts because I can get the fonts myself. Font designers willing to give me the (broken?) font showing any hinting/rasterisation error beyond the 7 above are welcomed to do so... Within limits, that is :). 
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    I have a spare macbook, sure. Any particular version of OSX you need?
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 674
    Anyone with a mac and a PC could copy the files to the PC and run the validator there. This would speed things up considerably. Or maybe running it in VM would be faster then wine.
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 361
    edited July 2016
    @Dave Crossland : I do most things on10.9.5, though if you are already on Yosemite or el capitan I'll be happy to take the report, and find the font to match myself.

    Note that I am talking about running the old 2003 binary - it needs genuine dotnet runtime (i.e. Windows, or wine with a non-default configuration).

    @Georg Seifert : yes, I believe you are right - vm should much faster than wine for this sort of thing.

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