[OpenFontLibrary] Windows 5k Name table restriction

[Garrick Van Buren]

Nicolas,

Thanks for the update on that unfortunate bug. Great to hear it's fixed.

I just committed a update of the fontforge_font_optimizer.pe - it no longer includes the workaround for that MS bug.

I agree - needing to change metadata to get fonts to successfully render is an awkward proposition.

-----------------------
Garrick Van Buren
612 325 9110
garrick at kernest.com
-----------------------
Kernest.com
Free, Subscription, and Web Native fonts.
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On May 8, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Nicolas Spalinger wrote:

>>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/
>>> 
>>> This article says that a regression was introduced by security update
>>> 961371. The regression imposes an artificial 2,500 character length
>>> limitation on strings that are contained in OpenType or TrueType fonts.
>>> They mean 2.5K Unicode characters, or 5000 bytes.
>>> 
>>> A subsequent security update, 972270, has restored the character length
>>> limitation for individual strings to 64 KB (32,768 Unicode characters),
>>> matching the OpenType specification.
>>> 
>>> Carry on embedding!
>> 
>> 
>> Hey that was quick :-)
>> Thanks for researching this and posting the precise details!
>> 
>> Good to know the bug was fixed. Thanks to the MS folks for their efforts
>> in getting this resolved.
>> 
>> We can carry on metadata-ing as well :-)
>> And adjust the checks in the open font design toolkit.
> 
> Fontforge's new stable release has this in the changelog
> (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/changelog.html#change-log)
> 
> " Some time ago MS put in a patch to their OS so that they would refuse
> to load a font with a name table >5K. They have now decided that was an
> error http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/ And have removed the
> limitation.
> 
> So remove the warning ff used to generate about name tables bigger than
> 5K. "
> 
> 
> So no need to resort to mangling the metadata to make things "work"
> again because of this Windows-only limitation and deviation from the
> published spec.
> 
> For example line 26 to 42 in
> http://github.com/garrickvanburen/Fontue/blob/master/workflow/fontforge_font_optimizer.pe
> should be dropped. The better solution is not stripping away metadata
> but getting upstream to fix such mistakes. Seriously, replacing official
> metadata the authors themselves have put in with garbage isn't exactly
> very nice. Quite clearly copyright infringement and breach of licenses.
> Certainly not the way to get open font designers to respect you. Please
> don't do it ever.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> -- 
> Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
> Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
> http://planet.open-fonts.org
> 
>