Repairing Existing Fonts
Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 7:05 pm
Repairing Existing Fonts
When I ran Fix Font Folder I was startled to see how few “clean” fonts I had on my computer. Most of them had something wrong with them. I do not trust the “Repair Items” part of FiFoFo because I have seen automated things go awry before, so I’ve saved the list and have been trying to fix them one font at a time. That takes a LOT (translate years!) of time.
The errors tend to be in two categories: Font Information, and Glyph Errors.
Font Information Errors are items like: naming errors, missing necessary information, unexpected or mis-placed information, improper platforms, mapping errors, and so on.
Glyph errors are: Contours with improper directions, overlapping contours, contours with only one or two points, open contours, knots, and redundant or extreme point placement.
FiFoFo identifies both kinds of problems.
Font Validation Wizard only concerns itself with the latter.
With Font, Validate, Next, - The “Fix detected problems” checkbox is sometimes a disastrous choice, especially if you save the new variation on top of the old one without checking EACH glyph and making sure you like the results. You had better have an original backup somewhere.
When I’ve used the checkbox, more often than not I end up trashing the results (most of which worked fine) and start over again manually, repairing one glyph at a time.
My suggestion is to slow the Fix detected problems down to a Before/After - Accept/Reject screen on each glyph. The few remaining rejected glyphs could then be attended to manually instead of starting off all over again with the whole list.
It would also be nice for the Validate Glyph window to remain resident on the screen as corrections are made, then Updated to make sure there are no remaining problems before moving on to the next glyph.
When I ran Fix Font Folder I was startled to see how few “clean” fonts I had on my computer. Most of them had something wrong with them. I do not trust the “Repair Items” part of FiFoFo because I have seen automated things go awry before, so I’ve saved the list and have been trying to fix them one font at a time. That takes a LOT (translate years!) of time.
The errors tend to be in two categories: Font Information, and Glyph Errors.
Font Information Errors are items like: naming errors, missing necessary information, unexpected or mis-placed information, improper platforms, mapping errors, and so on.
Glyph errors are: Contours with improper directions, overlapping contours, contours with only one or two points, open contours, knots, and redundant or extreme point placement.
FiFoFo identifies both kinds of problems.
Font Validation Wizard only concerns itself with the latter.
With Font, Validate, Next, - The “Fix detected problems” checkbox is sometimes a disastrous choice, especially if you save the new variation on top of the old one without checking EACH glyph and making sure you like the results. You had better have an original backup somewhere.
When I’ve used the checkbox, more often than not I end up trashing the results (most of which worked fine) and start over again manually, repairing one glyph at a time.
My suggestion is to slow the Fix detected problems down to a Before/After - Accept/Reject screen on each glyph. The few remaining rejected glyphs could then be attended to manually instead of starting off all over again with the whole list.
It would also be nice for the Validate Glyph window to remain resident on the screen as corrections are made, then Updated to make sure there are no remaining problems before moving on to the next glyph.