FAIL: 'created' timestamp seems very low; regarding as unix timestamp

Ramiro Espinoza

Hi there,

Fontbakery is flagging one of my fonts with:

FAIL: 'created' timestamp seems very low; regarding as unix timestamp

Does anybody know how this issue can be fixed?

Thanks in advance.

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

I will start by checking created position in head table with ttx from fonttools

ttx font.otf and in font.ttx

if date would be very old, it can be manually corrected, and font again compiled.

Ramiro Espinoza

Thanks! I found a weird creation date (1970). No idea how this data was inserted, since the source FL files have the right creation date.

André G. Isaak

Not a weird date, a zero date. In Unix time began on, January 1, 1970 along with life, the universe, and everything.

Simon Cozens

That's kind of interesting, because the OpenType epoch is not January 1 1970, but the same as the Mac epoch (January 1 1904). FL put a "zero" in there, but that got converted to the wrong zero.

Ramiro Espinoza

I think I've found the problem: when I generate the fonts with Fontlab 5.1.4., for some reason “LONGDATETIME created” is empty. If I open the fonts with FL7 and re-export them the LONGDATETIME fields have the correct data.

Hin-Tak Leung

As Simon said: creation / modification dates in fonts are recorded as number of seconds since 1904 (macintosh convention), not 1970 (unix time zero). So those fields in most new fonts should be about ~120 years in #seconds(and the oldest fonts made in the 1980's would have 80 years' worth of seconds) , rather than ~50 years counting from 1970.

People in ~1954 (1904 + 50) have rather different ideas about types being metal blocks, instead of shapes on computers - and computers were made of cathode ray tubes around ~1955....

Mark Simonson

@Hin-Tak Leung I think you mean electron or vacuum tubes. Cathode ray tubes were for screens.

Hin-Tak Leung

Oops yes, it is all vacuum tubes in the 50s. Valid fonts have dates in seconds of 80-ish to 120-ish years (1904 + 80 = 1984 to 1904 + 120 = 2024) , not seconds in 10 to 50 years (1980 - 2020, counting from 1970).