[Scribus] font lint tool

Gregory Pittman gpittman
Tue Sep 4 15:02:31 CEST 2007


Craig Ringer wrote:
> gww at silcom.com wrote:
>   
>> At the Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal I was asked by someone from Scribus
>> (and I can't recall who any longer) to write a tool for checking that a font was
>> valid (didn't have any intersecting contours, had points at the extrema, etc.)
>>
>> I have now written this tool, called fontlint.
>> It is part of the current release of fontforge.
>>
>> http://fontforge.sf.net/
>>     
>
> Out of >2000 fonts I've run this on, including the full Adobe OTF
> collection, the MS TT core fonts, some scary old clipart CD fonts, and
> the Vera series, I've found exactly 16 faces that pass (all from the
> Adobe OTF collection).
>
> I realise that, like any `lint'-like tool, it'll identify all sorts of
> issues that are routinely worked around in practice or are merely
> warnings, but I'm still surprised by the the number of flat out fails.
>
> Is it possible that these fonts are all really that bad? Are there any
> quality collections it'll pass?
>
> Maybe the man page (and I'm impressed that there is one) needs to note
> that fails are extremely common in widely used sets of commercial fonts.
>   
>   
Do you know on a practical level what things like 'Self Intersecting 
Glyph' and 'Wrong Direction' mean? Would these be visible? Do they 
affect exporting to PDF?
Are there fonts without problems?

Greg



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