[CREATE] test result part 2 ( Re: Font Validator 2.1 release note/status, and libre font test results a year on after FontVal 2.0.)

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Forgot to mentioned this, though  it is not really of any major interest to most:

The debate or discussion around W6029 (Setting the loop variable to zero) turns out not to be interesting
as far as the objective of "getting a pass" is concerned. Despite Werner saying ttfautohints does that, of
the ~1400/1500 libre fonts with truetype outlines, only 21 shows that. 16 of them have other problems
with their hinting instructions so would have failed the hinting instruction test overall anyway;
i.e. only 5 fonts would have "passed the test" out of 1500 fonts (or 3283...). So the issue is
unimportant either way.

The 5 fonts, as far as I can remember, are all of the Bitstream*Mono and Vera*Mono variants, and not
really actively maintained. 
There are some duplicates among the 3283 fonts as TexLive ships a fair number of libre fonts also;
though not necessarily at the same version of the main OS.


To recap, here is the summary for the hinting instruction check:

3283      fonts
1[34]9x  skipped, CFF
1[34]9x  passed
394        fails to some degree
1            zero-length font file,filed at redhat's bugzilla, probably mis-packaging.

out of the 394; 21 shows  W6029; out of the 21, 5 shows ONLY W6029.


Also while testing the changes in glyf tests part of the new release (i.e. we are not talking
about FreeType any more), I noted that the KanjiStrokeOrders font 
(  http://www.nihilist.org.uk/
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KanjiStrokeOrders_fonts )
is especially poor in engineering terms - lots of very closely-spaced/overlapping control points,
hair pins - i.e. contours going back on itself - and some tight loops, and other poor constructs 
which causes older FontVal to crash when analysing the contours for knots and etc. This is all fixed
in Font Val 2.1 of course, but somebody might actually like to approach the font designer and offer
some help on making his font better...


--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 22/7/17, Hin-Tak Leung <htl10 at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

<snipped> 
 Below is the release notes. As I don't
 have the test results with me, I can only write from
 memory: out of the 3283 fonts shipped
 by fedora 26 ( a slightly larger number than fedora 24
 for which FontVal 2.0 was tested
 against), about 139x + 149x are uninteresting CFF fonts
 - which the hinting test skips, and
 those that passes - I can't remember which is which, but
 that adds up to 288x fonts.
 
 394 have some degree of problems with
 their hinting instructions;
 this is about the same as last year, so
 obviously this tool needs to be better publicised.
 One was a bad packaging of an
 zero-length file ( filed as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1473437 ).

<snipped>
 
 - Known Caveats:
...
   - W6029 (Setting the loop variable to zero is an error) may be withdrawn
           later as ttfauthint does it and there is no known problem, despite
           some apple and macrosoft docs saying so.