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Repairing Existing Fonts

Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 7:05 pm
by Dave Crosby
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.

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 8:31 am
by Dick Pape
Hi Dave

I'm surprised you've had problems with the "Fix detected problems".

I've a lot of experience with this feature and cannot remember when I've had to toss a font because of something it did. I might mess up glyphs or fonts, but not because FC did something wrong. Turning bowls black, for example, is an acceptable indicator to me of "you've got a problem that needs fixing". You can always Change Direction without fixing the problem.

When the glyph is incredibly complex, the number of changes required, after Font Validate, may be intimidating, but they all need to be corrected before going on to the next character!

I have restored a glyph from a backup many times if it couldn't be corrected easily in the time I had available. That's why we all maintain backups! That's a disappointment, but it's an isolated problem that I'd take as an exception.

I'd not want FC to slow down for an "Are You Sure" question and answer. In fact some time ago I wanted to get rid of that 2nd Validate window to speed up the flow.

Glyph Transformer does far more serious changes than Font Validate and there's an approprite warning that something untoward is a possibility. I've messed up a whole lot more characters there when I "overshoot" a change parameter.

I wonder if you can recreate some of these problems for us to look at.

Dick

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 6:30 am
by Jowaco
Hello Dave,

:? Your post didn't give us 'food for thought' but a veritable banquet. Most of my fonts are not precisely drawn and I have never noticed any difference after giving blanket permission to validate and repair all glyphs. I'm intrigued to know what changes occur that would make you trash a whole font and start again. Perhaps I am not looking critically enough? What should I be looking for?

I too have come to grief after agreeing to an automated process. Thank goodness for System Restore but..............doesn't this facility fall into the same category! I think, however, that it is only on, mercifully, very rare occasions when this happens.

Joe.

So many fonts, so little time!

Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2005 10:02 pm
by Dave Crosby
Many fonts were created by talented and knowledgeable people long ago. In the meantime, new inventions, new ideas, new platforms, and new protocols have made many of them obsolete.

Enthusiastic artistic newcomers with a diverse background of needs and knowledge, using a wide variety of products, and techniques have created A huge stockpile of wonderful fonts. I heard a rumor of one lady that had over 300,000 fonts in her collection!
A few of these are honed to perfection. Most are not. Many consist of just a few pictures, or only the uppercase letters, and so on.

I wish to thank Dick Pape, who has kindly been attempting to assist me in learning how to resuscitate many of these otherwise “dead fonts.” Many of them only need to be opened by “Font Creator,” select Tools, Auto Naming, and re-saving the font and Voila! They come back to life!
Others need to have new platforms added, mapping corrections, and so on.

Many “Free Fonts” were constructed by piling together a hand full of overlapping contours that were never joined together. Others joined the contours improperly, leaving knots in the finished contour lines. Yet others were scanned in and kept thousands of unneeded points. Many paper blemishes were accidentally preserved and need to be removed.

I also wish to thank Joe Coulthard for his enthusiastic support, and of course Erwin Denissen.

Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2005 7:49 pm
by Dick Pape
Hi Dave

Your message has been around so long, but I finally figured out a response to your statement about
Many “Free Fonts” were constructed by piling together a hand full of overlapping contours that were never joined together. Others joined the contours improperly, leaving knots in the finished contour lines
I felt my "Free Fonts" needed company, so I ran Font Validator on some well known Pay Fonts and found:

. Arial, Version 3.00 from The Monotype Corporation, has 1674 glyphs and 34 "still have problems".
. Times New Roman, Version 3.00 from Monotype, has 1674 glyphs and 38 "still have problems".
. Marlett, Version 1.00 from Microsoft, has 38 glyphs and NO remaining!
. Arial Unicode, Version 1.01 from Monotype has 50,377 glyphs 1706 partially fixed and 2588 "still have problems".

I suggest the problem is not solely a problem with Free Fonts. We are in good company when we create flawed fonts and we don't have the gall to charge for our errors.

Perspectively,

Dick

Re: Repairing Existing Fonts

Posted: Sun May 14, 2017 4:33 am
by Bhikkhu Pesala
I think this problem has been resolved in recent versions.
  1. Run the font validation wizard without fixing any errors
  2. Select the Validation Errors category in the glyph overview side panel
  3. Work through each glyph using the Validation toolbar to fix any errors.
If you feel that any further improvements are still needed, please start a new thread in the feature request forum.