What does "Outline Issues" mean?

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Erwin Denissen
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by Erwin Denissen »

nabsltd wrote: Tue Jul 24, 2018 7:06 pm And, here's another weird example.

Open the attached TTF file, and you'll see 18 characters with "Outline Issues".

Save the font as a FontCreator project and close the project.

Now, open the project file you just saved. The "Outline Issues" are gone.

The same thing happens if you save the original file as an OTF/TTF file and then open the newly saved file. So, FontCreator is doing something to "fix" the outline issues when the file is saved, but I'd still really like to know what, exactly, the "issues" are in the first place.
Thank you for letting us know!

These are inadvertently reported issues. This bug will be fixed with the next upcoming release.
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nabsltd
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by nabsltd »

Erwin Denissen wrote: Wed Jul 25, 2018 9:08 am Thank you for letting us know!

These are inadvertently reported issues. This bug will be fixed with the next upcoming release.
So, will "real" outline issues be dealt with as well? Because there are some fonts where saving and loading again does not change the reported "issues", but there is still no indicator what, exactly, the problems might be.
Leon Gauthier
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by Leon Gauthier »

More than a year later, I am tracking down the same problems. However, when I downloaded your file and opened it, there were no glyphs noted with "outline issues". When I ran font/validation, it came back with "123 glyphs have been (partially) fixed. 8 glyphs still have problems." and eight glyphs were listed as having "Validation Issues". Once they were fixed, they were no longer marked as having "Validation Issues". The whole process worked as expected!

The automatic fixing of 123 glyphs was pretty impressive given the mess they were in. I even tried saving a fcp file, closing the project and then re-opening it in the hopes that that alone would cleanup the glyphs but, alas, the 123 problems were still there.

I experimented with another font file which, upon opening, FC reports that 12 of 1101 glyphs have "Outline Issues" and those glyphs are indeed tagged as having issues. Using the validation toolbar with real time enabled, I stepped through each of the 12 "offending glyphs" and only found one which had extreme off curve point problem. I then ran Font/Validate and it reported that "1033 glyphs have been (partially) fixed. 0 glyphs still have problems" but I still had 12 glyphs tagged as having "Outline Issues".
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Leon Gauthier wrote: Mon Sep 23, 2019 6:19 am More than a year later, I am tracking down the same problems. However, when I downloaded your file and opened it, there were no glyphs noted with "outline issues". When I ran font/validation, it came back with "123 glyphs have been (partially) fixed. 8 glyphs still have problems." and eight glyphs were listed as having "Validation Issues". Once they were fixed, they were no longer marked as having "Validation Issues". The whole process worked as expected!

The automatic fixing of 123 glyphs was pretty impressive given the mess they were in. I even tried saving a fcp file, closing the project and then re-opening it in the hopes that that alone would cleanup the glyphs but, alas, the 123 problems were still there.

I experimented with another font file which, upon opening, FC reports that 12 of 1101 glyphs have "Outline Issues" and those glyphs are indeed tagged as having issues. Using the validation toolbar with real time enabled, I stepped through each of the 12 "offending glyphs" and only found one which had extreme off curve point problem. I then ran Font/Validate and it reported that "1033 glyphs have been (partially) fixed. 0 glyphs still have problems" but I still had 12 glyphs tagged as having "Outline Issues".
It seems FontCreator works as expected. Did you manage to find the issues related to those 12 glyphs?
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by Leon Gauthier »

Yes, I did, thank you.

In my case, the "offending" glyphs were all iterations of the Devanagari vowel sign I which stands to the left of a consonant, reaching over the consonant with various lengths.
twelve indians.png
twelve indians.png (9.01 KiB) Viewed 3338 times
As a combining glyph it has negative bearings on both the left and the right sides. So, the fact that I had to cleanup off-curve extreme points for these glyphs was not the reason they were on the "Outline Issues" list.
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by Erwin Denissen »

In this case FontCreator incorrectly identifies outline issues, as the bearings are fine. So in this case you can safely ignore the warning.
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Re: What does "Outline Issues" mean?

Post by Leon Gauthier »

Erwin Denissen said:
In this case FontCreator incorrectly identifies outline issues, as the bearings are fine.
Could the outline issues found here be from the fact that the overall widths of the glyphs are much larger than the Advance Widths?

For example: in the Semibold font, the smallest vowel sign I has an advance width of 290 funits while the glyph itself spans -42 to 1206 for a total of 1248 funits along the x axis. Mathematically, these numbers add up as in, Span -|LSB|- |RSB| = Advance Width. So, I wonder just what triggers the "outline issue"?

Anyway, part of my problem was conflating "Outline Issues" with "Validation Issues"; expecting that correcting validation issues would fix or eliminate outline issues. I see now that they are separate issues.

BTW, I am not clear on just what the "Refresh" button on the Validation: real-time box actually does. I would expect it to remove a glyph from the validation issues list once one has fixed it but that seems not to be the case.
Erwin Denissen said:
So in this case you can safely ignore the warning.
Well, yeah, the font seems to function just fine even with the off-curve extremes uncorrected! However, one is loath to leave warnings unheeded. 8)
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