[CREATE] Microsoft Font Validator adds SVG checking, and 2nd Mac OS X native release

[Hin-Tak Leung]

2016-01-22 was tagged on github ( https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator ).

Code snapshots (-src-*), mono/.net binaries (*-bin-*) and Mac OS X disk images (*.dmg) are at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hp-pxl-jetready/files/Microsoft Font Validator/

Compared to the last (2016-01-06), there are many Mac OS friendly improvements on the native executable - this is the 2nd release snapshot built for Mac OS X to run without Mono. Both windows and Mac OS X binaries are essentially unpack (unzip for windows, mount disk image for OS X), and double-click on the red-icon inside, to launch the Font Validator GUI itself now. The mono/.net binaries on Linux now has a partially working XML report viewer hooked into webkit; the same binary uses MSIE for XML viewing on windows, as it did in 2003.

Also for the first time since being released under the MIT license in November, new tests are added: 6 tests on SVG table are added, which makes the total number of tests 200 now. There is also a new SVGInfo tool, which can pretty-print SVG table data for further detailed manual examination with the -v option.

The new SVG checking code does a fairly comprehensive checking of the SVG table, and support transparent decompression of the SVG data, as well as trying to load them as XML to check for syntax errors. A likely future update will add svg DTD validation based on a locally cached DTD.

Also minor addition to supporting newer GDEF table.

Please do make a donation ( http://sourceforge.net/p/hp-pxl-jetready/donate/) if you find this useful. I am still exploring how this might continue. It does take a good amount of effort and time. Participation from Microsoft folks had been sparse - but then it has been 12 years since their last release, and 6 years since their internal code update, so expectation isn't high... Interested parties, from the large corporations like Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, to smaller schools and universities teaching typography/font design, foundaries, please consider commissioning part of the continual development.

One what next - from the newest and latest SVG table, I have turned to having a look at the oldest unsupported one - CFF. Microsoft did not implement any CFF checking at all, mostly I guess due to their (past?) limitation of the MS renderer's capability. Since we gained a Freetype-based backend in autumn, just before it went MIT, that limitation is no longer the case. I have already added CFF table processing to extract the Postscript dictionaries and data structures, and there is also the beginning of a new tool called "CFFInfo" - a complete lack of imagination in naming - which allows a power user (currently that means just me...) to manually examines the Postscript dictionaries and data structures in the CFF table of an open type font, just like the DSIGInfo and SVGInfo tools. When CFFInfo matures, I'll push it out. Actually checking Postscript dictionaries within the font validator, in an automated manner, seems a rather large and daunting task. Obviously Adobe would be an interesting party to approach to see if they can commission the work, so please forward if appropriate.