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

Ramiro Espinoza
Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
edited June 2021 in Font Technology
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.
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Comments

  • Grzegorz Luk (gluk)
    Grzegorz Luk (gluk) Posts: 161
    edited June 2021
    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
    Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
    edited June 2021
    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.
  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 791
    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
    Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
    edited July 2021
    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
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    edited July 2021
    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
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,750
    @Hin-Tak Leung I think you mean electron or vacuum tubes. Cathode ray tubes were for screens.
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    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).

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