[CREATE] FontVal changes and the next set of test results of libre fonts

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Hi all,

Since mid-May actually, for about two months now, I have been running my fedora linux box with the system freetype fully patched /enabled with the FontVal changes without noticeable problems.

To recap, when Microsoft opened the Font Validator code base, they left out a few pieces, one of which was the part which does truetype hinting instruction analysis (a.k.a. "rasterization tests"). A replacement based on FreeType was gradually developed over the last 3 years, and was "feature complete" (as in, implementing all of the previous, more or less) last summer. There were some discussion about up-streaming those changes; and before that can happen, if at all, they must not interfere with normal freetype usage as the system font renderer.

So anyway, 

The test results of all of fedora shipped fonts - about 3600 of those - around mid-May, using the system's enhanced freetype library, at 10pt, is here 
http://htl10.users.sourceforge.net/tmp/fc28-ras-results.tgz

and at the beginning of June I also collected all the test results, again at 10pt, for all Ubuntu WSL (supposedly 16.04) shipped fonts, again about 3500 of them - is here
http://htl10.users.sourceforge.net/tmp/ubuntu-wsl-reports.tgz

Font owners etc can have a look. 

There were some interface adjustments to both the C# binding and the python binding to the enhanced backend for adapting to system-freetype usage, at

https://github.com/HinTak/freetype-py ,  font-diag branch.
https://github.com/HinTak/SharpFont , v4??+fixes branch.

The next important change to Font Val has to be re-enabling building with MS visual studio. Apparently at least two people have had a go (without trying to tell me to co-ordinate the effort)... according to the network of forks...

https://github.com/Microsoft/Font-Validator/network
https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/network