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.
Comments
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.