I am considering working on the PANOSE font matching part of Fontmatrix because I enjoy playing with Fontmatrix, but its idea of how PANOSE’s individual facets1 are named or work seems to me to be a bit wonky. For instance, it only understands the names for Latin Text facets, and uses them even for Latin Decorative or Pictorial fonts. The first step (apart from trying to persuade my one-year-old son to go to sleep long enough for me to even turn on the computer), is to take a look at whether improved matching or re-classifying facilities would do any good at all, and for that, I need to take a look at font classifications in the wild.

Wow, that was a meaty piece of work. Serafettin Cartoon fonts now builds with the latest release of FontForge, as well as CVS head, and taught me quite a bit about FontForge in the process. Serafettin had a bunch of glyphs with self-intersection problems, and these were causing FontForge to crash on the Expand Stroke operation. Because Serafettin uses scripts to build the different weights, it was hard to see where the problem was until I made FontForge a lot more verbose about which glyphs it was processing.

I’ve recently been triaging FontForge bugs on Fedora, and hit a problem with bug 600108, in which the latest version of FontForge crashes while building Serafettin. I patched FontForge locally, so I could identify the glyphs that caused it to crash, but I’ve now come to the conclusion that Serafettin itself is the problem, and FontForge’s validation says as much, in these lines: Two glyphs have the same name. Two glyphs have the same unicode.

Adam Hyde came up with a question about a misrendering of a font on the FontForge Users’ mailing list. A colleague had designed a font in FontForge which looked fine except when used in Adobe Illustrator (of unspecified version). He provided two examples of characters whose shapes had developed distinct “ears”. Peter Baker suggested that the common feature in this case was that the first point of the contours was not on the curve.

I still have VT100 terminal, but it’s in storage. I figured I could pretend that it was on my desk if I made a font that looked like the old beast, including the gaps between scan lines.

Once I’d started, I needed the reverse video form of it, and the forms correctly underlined, and double width, and double height and double width. Blinking is more problematic 😉

A while ago, I recovered my old font files from some crufty old SuperDisks, but did nothing more with them than copy them to my network storage, in the hope that that is a safer home. Last weekend I was reading about the Fedora Fonts SIG, and decided to bring the old font files back to life. The Fonts SIG is concerned with packaging fonts for Fedora, but their pages have some interesting pointers on how they might be created as well, so I grabbed an old font and explored the tools that are available.