Errors in MyFont Font Platform

Jess Latham
Jess Latham Posts: 43
in Type Business
After uploading my latest font to the font platform, I got some error messages in the, will it install on mac section:

Your font may have serious errors. Please check your font files.
Family name: *********
Subfamily name: Regular
Error reason: Format 2 segment (401, 401, 117) overlaps or contains duplicates of other ranges.

Family name:*********
Subfamily name: Regular
Error reason: Format 2 segment (578, 579, 193) overlaps or contains duplicates of other ranges.

about 35 of those messages.

I uploaded 2 fonts and this is the only one that had any errors. I'm thinking it might have something to do with the outlines, maybe points that overlap. I went through it and found some twisted points (for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to hit optimize and now I'm regretting it). This font has about 800 characters so it's tedious work. After going through it for hours, still got errors, so maybe there are more twisted points that I didn't find. Does anyone have a clue if I'm on the right track?

Comments

  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,432
    In FontLab, running the remove overlap filter 3 times in a row can fix a lot of these problems.
  • Jess Latham
    Jess Latham Posts: 43
    Ray, I did try remove overlap but nothing.

    I did some removing and adding back glyphs, removing and adding back opentype features. Finally, when removing just the calt and swsh features, everything passed. So, something in those features is buggy, although I've tested it and everything works exactly how it should. It makes sense though, since I added a whole bunch of opentype that I had never done before. Maybe the error is referring to opentype features overlapping?
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,432
    It could be that Myfonts is mistakenly seeing overlaps where there are none. Things like this are why I don't upload new typefaces to MyFonts anymore. They also have an issue with double-mapping which prevents me from uploading any all-caps fonts I make.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,890
    Ray Larabie said:
    They also have an issue with double-mapping which prevents me from uploading any all-caps fonts I make.
    Do you mean their automation dislikes double-mapped glyphs in fonts?
  • Jess Latham
    Jess Latham Posts: 43
    Hmm, the all caps font that I uploaded was the one that had no errors, hee.

    I am finding duplicates in the classes for the opentype I created but it's like finding needles in haystacks, ugh. I'm seeing patterns in the error code and I think the numbers are corresponding to the index, 401 is an entry stroke character for example.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,890
    Jess, what app are you on these days? Still on FontLab Studio 5?

    IIRC, FLS 5 did not have great error-checking for this sort of thing—while FL 7 doesn’t even allow you to create conflicting classes in the first place.
  • Jess Latham
    Jess Latham Posts: 43
    Yes, still using 5, but I was planning to update to 7 this year. 
  • Jess Latham
    Jess Latham Posts: 43
    Ok, it seems to be passing the tests now, ah! but now it's showing a vertical metrics pop up, it wasn't showing that before, but I think I can get that fixed easily.
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,432
    edited January 2020
    @Thomas Phinney
    Do you mean their automation dislikes double-mapped glyphs in fonts?
    It doesn't see the double mapping so it flags those characters as missing. These days I make all my all-caps display fonts with the lowercase double-mapped and they all get rejected by MyFonts for missing a lowercase. In applications, the double-mapped lowercase works fine. I could go to the trouble of undoublemapping for a single font but with something like Dealerplate it's a big project. Generating the composite duplicates wouldn't be difficult but I don't really want to deal with making sure 17 slightly different versions of the kerning classes are error free. And afterwards I'd have to maintain a second version just for one distributor.

    And for textured fonts, the MyFonts importer is very finicky. Extremely detailed textured fonts push the boundaries of not-crashing and there's a balance between proper curves and too many points. Tiny details get flagged as overlapping when they don't appear to be overlapping. Extremely detailed textured fonts are hard on your system but I think that's just the nature of those types of fonts. I wonder how many other textured fonts don't launch on MyFonts because they can't make it past the filter. I mean look at this character set...times six. There's no way I'm going to manually inspect every curve and have it finished by 2030.
  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 689
    MyFonts distinguishes between errors (red flags) and warnings (yellow flags). The latter don't prevent the font from being submitted, so I just noted that my all-caps font is double-encoded and the team accepted it.
  • Lucas de Groot
    Lucas de Groot Posts: 6
    The error Jess got was probably caused by a glyph being twice in a context (e.g. inside classes). One would expect the AFDKO to filter that out. Apparently, classes for context are more sensitive than simple substitution classes. Neither Glyphs 3 nor FontLab 7 have a problem compiling doubled context, so maybe they filter the double out, or Monotype is the bug :-)
  • Lucas de Groot
    Lucas de Groot Posts: 6
    After more reading and testing, a double glyph in context is indeed not allowed.
    Only FontCreator 14 finds this bug while compiling. (and other bugs missed by FL7/G3)
    FontCreator's OpenType capabilities are stunning, it even has an interface for all aspects of Character Variations, and a GUI to put variable triplets in the Item Variation Store.

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