Font Validator 2.1.5 release

Hin-Tak Leung · June 2020

Release note of 2.1.5 at the bottom - It has been 18 months since 2.1.4. The good thing since 2.1.4 is that I finally got round to work on the C# part of Font Validator (instead of fixing up missing components, and etc), the part which were open-sourced by Microsoft, so there are some small but general improvements in processing many of the opentype tables.

Mac OS X support (and Apple's tightening security with 10.14/10.15) continues to be a challenge - there are a few in-progress patches to mono. Command-line tool is now out, but I'll need to work with Georg a bit more to get the GUI out (when he has time). The longer term solution would probably be for me to pay for a signing certficate and learn to use it, to conform to recent tighter security and requirement of digitial signatures for binaries shipped to run on Mac OS X.

The most exciting event since 2.1.4, and in the near future, is the increased maturity of Darling (a project similar to WINE, but for Mac OS X - a SHIM/ emulation layer for running Mac OS X binaries on Linux). With a bit of effort, and again a few patch-series to various parts of darling, I managed to run the bulk of Apple's Font Tools, including Apple's command-line font validating tool, ftxvalidator, under darling somewhat. The interesting part is gaining insights about what Apple's font system like or dislike, etc. I hope to put the details out at https://github.com/HinTak/ftx-darling including links to the patch series, out soon. And since we are friendly with the FreeType folks, got the C# code from Microsoft, we are getting closer to covering quirks and preferences of font systems on all the major platforms.

So grab 2.1.5 :

https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/releases

and libre font owners, have a look at the subset reports at (was for fedora, ubuntu; and now raspbian too):

https://github.com/HinTak/FontVal-Tests-at-10pt/

and lastly, if you find it useful, and/or especially given the Mac OS X certificate issue, consider making a donation:

https://sourceforge.net/p/hp-pxl-jetready/donate/

FontVal 2.1.5 , Jun 9 2020

=============

- No functionality change in the Freetype backend, other than passsively

upgrading to VER-2-10-1-71-g4b08cdf78 based on 2.10.1 .

- fixed about a dozen of issues /improvements on OS/2, cmap, head, hmtx,

name tables.

- Thanks Miguel Sousa for patches, Stevan White for many of the issues

with SMP / large font sets, and Georg Seifert and Rich Fitzgerald on

Mac OS X related issues.

- Mac binary now based on patched mono

( https://github.com/HinTak/mono-modification/ )

- Built and tested on Raspbian too.

- The Mac build tested successfully on darling.Type your message

Hin-Tak Leung · June 2020

Just to say I have decided to make a 2.1.6 release, with a small but important update about non-NULL FeatureParams in the GPOS/GSUB tables. Many thanks to @Georg Seifert for updating the OSX GUI too!