FontForge 20061014 review

FontForge is an outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg a

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: George Williams

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FontForge is an outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf) fonts, or edit existing ones.

Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats.

FontForge's user interface has been localized for: (English), Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish.

With the appropriate libraries, FontForge can import png, tiff, and gif images to act as character backgrounds for tracing purposes (FontForge can import bmp and xbm formats without external libraries).

With libxml2 FontForge can read SVG fonts. With the freetype library FontForge will do a better job making bitmap characters for you.

None is required for the proper compilation/execution of FontForge, if the libraries are not present they will not be used.

What's New in This Release:
New translations: Greek, Simplified Chinese, German, Polish.
Using the help command would generally crash fontforge on cygwin.
Adobe uses the American spelling of diaeresis (that is dieresis), but some fonts contain glyph names with the European spelling. So add that as an alternate.
If a bdf font contained an unencoded .notdef glyph, then we crashed.
Adding Greek translations for font styles. (Thanks to Apostolos)
If we aren't dealing with a TeX math font, then the "Sub/super"script positioning fields of Glyph Info->TeX aren't meaningful. So grey them out.
Remove internal/external did the wrong thing in expand stroke if we also removed overlap and had counter-clockwise splines.
Alexej Kryukov points out that reverting a glyph with anchors lost the anchors.
Add simplified Chinese style names to our built-in lists.
Problem reading autotraced input.
The encoding change of last summer broke tfm output with glyph lists or extension characters.
If add extrema added a point too close to a start/end point expand stroke could generate NaNs.
FF could crash when adding extrema to an open contour.
Add Polish styles to the translation list.
Add a scripting function to set the gasp table.
Add support for the 'gasp' table.
Alexej Kryukov wants format 6 cmap tables.
After editing instructions the debugger would incorrectly complain that instructions were out of date.
Michal Nowakowski complains that "Instructions are out of date" warning appears too many times when doing a global transformation. Make it only pop up as a dlg once and thereafter occur as a LogError.
If a font contained only space glyphs it could still be marked onlybitmaps and not allow outline generation.
Show ATT did not translate scripts & languages.
Parsing an empty list of ttf instructions crashed Michael Zedler's machine.
Make type1 generation use (essentially) the same subroutine mechanism as type2.
Local subroutines were being freed twice in cff cid-keyed font generation.
Removing an alternate unicode encoding (Detach Glyphs) was broken in some cases.
FF failed to perform some simplifications on the last spline of a closed contour.
Various fixes for Michal N.
Add scripting interfaces to many of the ctype functions.
Add a scripting interface to the 'size' feature, now that Adobe has finally decided what to do about 'size'.
Had the wrong title for kerning state machine dlgs.
Redo the preference dlg.
The two preference items, AlwaysGenApple, and AlwaysGenOpenType, were a bad choice on my part and have lead to considerable confusion. I mentioned some time ago that I would remove them if there were no objection.

There was no objection.

I have now removed them.

I also made the SetPrefs scripting function sort of work if the user tries to set one of these (it will set the appropriate flags in the default option set used by generate).

The defaults of these flags were different on the Mac from everywhere else. This meant that a script could do different things on the Mac and on linux. That seems like a bad idea. I have changed things so that the default options setting for generate is always OpenType.

THIS IS AN INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE AND SCRIPTS ON THE MAC COULD NOW BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY.

Patch from Michal Nowakowski to have ff number points after conversion to quadratic.
Try to provide disambiguation for all strings "New" so that in languages where "New" must agree in gender with the thing being created translators will be happier.
Remove the po/Makefile.in and redo the configure script to build it (so that I don't have to modify it each time I get a new language).
Extend the knife tool so that if Meta (Alt) is held down it will move any spline it intersects (rather than cutting the spline).
FF would crash if $HOME (the directory that is, not the environment variable) did not exist.
I guess it makes sense that if ff read in a compressed sfd file then using a simple File->Save command (not Save As) should produce another compressed sfd file.
When scaling a reference in otf output we had problems if the reference had more than one contour.
If we deleted many glyphs from a font we are sometimes left with kern pairs pointing to things not worth outputting. Make sure we don't generate kerning info for them.
Ligature carets were not being scaled by scale to em.
Patch from mfabian at suse.
If a user has a font with a glyph that is bigger than 16*em-size (in many dimensions) and that user generates a tfm file, then warn him that the glyph can't be expressed in a tfm file and truncate the size to the biggest legal value.
Attempt to mitigate the effects of X claiming to have a font when it doesn't.
Saving CID keyed fonts would look at garbage memory for its encoding data if not saved from the biggest subfont.
Add support for version 4 of the OS/2 table.
If Interpretation was set in a font then when generating a 8/16 type cmap fontforge always went down the traditional chinese (big5) branch.
MS has changed their indic shaping engine. It still uses the same features but they are applied differently. To disambiguate this change they have created a parallel set of script tags for the indic writing system. FontForge should recognize these and use them when appropriate.
When Adobe first released fonts with a 'size' feature they did not follow the opentype specification. In August of 2006 they announced an incompatible change to bring fonts produced after that date in line with the specification. Unfortunately there are programs which depend on the old, broken format.
Legacy programs will not work when given a font in the correct format. New programs should be able to handle either correct or broken 'size' features.
FontForge should now be able to read in a size feature in either format and gives the user the option of producing 'size' features in either format on output.
For Japanese fonts we tried to use cp932 (a variant of sjis) but then halfway through didn't know what to do with it.
Another fix for saving sub-opentype fonts from a cid font.
From a script, if a user asks to generate a ttf outline font with ttf bitmaps from a database with no outlines then technically this isn't supposed to work. But it used to and it's easy enough to tweak so that it works again.
Update to Unicode 5.0
Again when adding accents to the left of a glyph we should shift the glyph over to give it a reasonable lbearing.
When building an accented glyph, we generally want use_my_metrics set on the reference. But if we add an accent to right (horn) or left (psili/varia on cap greeks) we want to turn it off. We did turn it off on the right side, but not on the left.
Philipp Poll points out that ScaleToEm doesn't scale the OS/2 metrics (and some other stuff). Actually it does, but font info did the scaling BEFORE setting the values. So the metrics get scaled, and then reset to the values in fontinfo (which usually means they don't get changed).
Fix some memory leaks.
Some fixes for pcf loading.
Various fixes to CID keyed fonts.
Even the pretty ttf approximation routines need to worry about diametrically opposed control points.
When generating multiple type1 fonts, output the bounding box of each as that of the full font. This will make it vaguely likely that applications will get the same line spacing.
Oops. The vertical metrics bit wasn't preserved when flattening a cid font.
Ack! Window titles and such were being interpreted in Latin1 and not in UTF-8.
Interpretation of PostScript arc operator failed if the two angles were 360 degrees apart. Normalization made them both the same.
Try to clean up bitmap only sfnt generation.
pcf wasn't in the Open Font dialog format list (nor was pmf, nor pdf)
Add a filter for TeX bitmap fonts.
Provide a mechanism (if a preference item is set) for picking a cmap when loading a font.