fontforge-devel — Bug reports, feature requests, etc.

[fontforge-devel] +Kerning

[Thales M. <tha...@gm...>]

Just to add to my previous message:

One more bug: When kerning through the metrics windows, when a pair occurs
more than once in the current string, it kerns to the wrong distance when
you grab and slide the kerning line.

One more feature request: If we could have a layer where we could draw
curves as kerning delimiters, or if the side bearings could be curves
instead of straight vertical lines, this information could be used to
automatically kern the font if it is translated to kerning distances when
we generate the font. We would draw the curves for the side bearings after
we finish drawing the glyph, and when we finish drawing all the glyphs we
would automatically have all the information needed to generate all the
font's kerning automatically, as, in text, the following glyph would be
placed in a distance where its left side bearing curve would be touching
the previous glyph's right side bearing curve.

[fontforge-devel] Kerning on metrics window and +

[Thales M. <tha...@gm...>]

Hi there.
A few missing features and bugs I want to report:

I am finishing a font on FontForge, which I'll publish for free later, and
I had a few problems:

1 - I have over 5000 classes to kern but I can't just produce all those
pairs and paste them to the metrics window to scroll through them while
adjusting the horizontal kerning, because, apparently, FontForge tries to
render the whole string for every screen refresh, what causes it to be
really slow, making it impossible to work. If it had a scroll system with
no beginning or end, and it only rendered the part of the string that is
showing, it would be totally possible and practical. Instead I had to
produce a PDF of all the pairs in only one line to keep selecting small
portions of if at a time and pasting them to the metrics window, which
takes way longer, skipping pairs because of the break. As the pdf viewer
only renders the part that is showing on the screen, I can scroll through
the pairs pretty quickly.

2 - FontForge's auto-kern feature for individual pairs, with the option
"touching" and with "default separation" set to 0, for some reason produces
most of the pairs touching each other, as it should, but some pairs are
produced with a wrong distance, far apart and not touching. If it produced
all the pairs at the correct distance, with a kerning value just enough for
the glyphs to touch, it would save me a year of extra work.

3 - It seems that FontForge's tool for changing the weight of a glyph
doesn't really work properly, producing erroneous curves and coordinates.
Perhaps you could take the code from InkScape's "Offset" feature from its
window "Path -> Path Effects", and convert it to work with FontForge's
coordinate system. Those InkScape transformations always seemed to work
fine. And the idea is to, of course, make it possible to change the weight
of all the font's glyphs with just one command. FontLab has 2 algorithms
for weight change that also work really well, but since its source is
closed, we are probably not going to be able to get access to it.

4 - There are some minor bugs that I occasionally encounter during the
utilization of the program, but nothing of too much concern. One thing
though that I couldn't figure out was a .ttf font that wasn't displaying
kerning information on any editor, and when I opened it on FontForge it
said that the font contained both a "GPOS" table and a "Kern" table, and
that the Kern table would only be considered if there was no kerning
information on the "GPOS" table. At the "font info" I could access the GPOS
tab with the lookups and all the kerning tables but could not get the pairs
in them to display on the metrics window or at the editor when I generated
the font. And I have no idea what FontForge meant by this warning message
or how to delete this "GPOS" table to make the kerning be read. One other
thing I couldn't figure out is how to lock the width of a glyph(when the
padlock shows near the right bearing), or how to lock the width of a
composite glyph to its base glyph width, without having to delete the glyph
and paste the reference again. But I guess that would be asking for too
much.

Best regards. Thales Martins.

[fontforge-devel] FontForge CI broken

[Maxim I. <io...@us...>]

Hi Jeremy and Frederick,

It looks like the FontForge CI (GitHub actions) is currently half-dead. I
tried to resurrect it (see https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/pull/5317),
but with a very limited success.

I managed to pass the Windows pipeline with fixed gettext and disabled
pyhook tests, but MacOS 10 and Ubuntu 18 pipelines are still dead.

MacOS 10 and Ubuntu 18 actions are never activated, probably because the
environments don't exist anymore (see list of runners at
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-jobs/choosing-the-runner-for-a-job#choosing-github-hosted-runners),
and updated pipelines for MacOS 11 and Ubuntu 20 fail due to some issues of
environment.

Could you please take a look and maybe disable the problematic actions for
the time being? I'm trying to submit a minor fix, and it can't be done as
long as the CI is broken.

Thank you in advance,
 -- Maxim.
<https://kishkush.net/@iorsh>

[fontforge-devel] How does FontForge insert missing font tables?

[Victor S. <vic...@is...>]

Hi,

I've noticed that FontForge fills in missing font tables when saving fonts.
For example, I've seen that FontForge fills in OS/2 tables and cmap tables
when saving a font as OpenType (CFF) even when they don't appear in the
original font.

I'm interested in how FontForge does this? Is it just "dummy data" that is
filled into these tables or is something more clever done? From a manual
inspection of the saved font it doesn't look like dummy data, so I'm quite
curious how FontForge achieves this.

I've tried searching in the code but it's quite opaque to me. If anyone
could give me some insight or point me in the right direction, that'd be
greatly appreciated :)

Best,
Victor Nordam Suadicani

Re: [fontforge-devel] [fontforge-users] Announcing - LibUniNamesList 14.0_beta 20210626

[Isabella P. <you...@gm...>]

Wtf i think you got the wrong email

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 11:15 Jose Da Silva <di...@jo...> wrote:

> For anyone interested in trying-out unicode NamesList 14.0_beta (before it
> is released in September), you may want to try the tar.gz. file located in:
> https://github.com/fontforge/libuninameslist/releases/tag/20210626
>
> This 14.0beta release is made to report as 13.9, not 14.0
>
> If you have comments about the contents of unicode 14.0beta, please
> contact
> unicode.org (before the closing date - 2021jul08). See this page:
> https://home.unicode.org/unicode-14-0-beta-review/
>
> If you select the "source" or" zip" files you will need to first run:
> autoreconf -i
> automake
>
> If you select the "dist" file libuninameslist-dist-20210626.tar.gz you can
> skip autoreconf and automake, and go directly to using ./configure
> run these steps:
> ./configure   ( --help will show options)
> make
> sudo make install
>
>
> Thanks,
> Joe
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>

[fontforge-devel] [fontforge-users] Announcing - LibUniNamesList 14.0_beta 20210626

[Jose Da S. <di...@jo...>]

For anyone interested in trying-out unicode NamesList 14.0_beta (before it 
is released in September), you may want to try the tar.gz. file located in:
https://github.com/fontforge/libuninameslist/releases/tag/20210626

This 14.0beta release is made to report as 13.9, not 14.0

If you have comments about the contents of unicode 14.0beta, please contact 
unicode.org (before the closing date - 2021jul08). See this page:
https://home.unicode.org/unicode-14-0-beta-review/

If you select the "source" or" zip" files you will need to first run:
autoreconf -i
automake

If you select the "dist" file libuninameslist-dist-20210626.tar.gz you can 
skip autoreconf and automake, and go directly to using ./configure
run these steps:
./configure   ( --help will show options)
make
sudo make install


Thanks,
Joe

[fontforge-devel] Design With FontForge reg

[Nathan W. <nw...@gl...>]

Howdy.

Quick question: I've personally renewed the domain registration for
DesignWithFontForge.com every year — but I also don't do that out of any
attempt to hold on to a piece of the infrastructure. Rather, it's just
because back when we started the book, I had an active account with a
registrar and somebody had to do it, but there was no semblance of a formal
FontForge organization.

I'm happy to keep renewing the registration, but my preference would be to
transfer it to a _properly_formalized_project_organization_. As far as I
can tell, that formal organization does not (yet) exist.

What is the current thinking on setting one up? Or, alternatively, did that
happen at some point and I just missed the news?

I will prime the pump only by saying that a formal org can exist without
that org necessarily claiming copyright on the source code; just handling
trademarks and things is also quite doable.

Thanks,
Nate
PS - also please note that this is not a thread for people volunteering as
individuals to take on the domain renewal. That's not necessary in addition
to not being what I'm asking.
-- 
nathan.p.willis
nw...@gl... <http://identi.ca/n8>

[fontforge-devel] Japanese Fallback Font Recommendation

[Paul H. <uni...@gm...>]

Greetings,

I recommend adding the font family "Unifont-JP" as the last fallback
font in FontForge, where "unifont" and "unifont upper" appear in
fontforge/fontforgeui.h.  That font variation has Japanese versions of
glyphs, so it is possible that a Japanese system could have that
installed rather than the standard "Unifont" font, which contains
Chinese variations.

In addition, the Unifont-JP version contains all 303 glyphs in Unicode
Plane 2 that are in the JIS X 0213 standard.  Those are the only
Unicode Plane 2 glyphs in any Unifont variation.  Because the Unicode
Plane 2 glyphs are not as common as the Unicode Plane 0 glyphs, it is
possible that no other font on a system will contain them.

You can look at the table titled "GNU Unifont Glyphs — Japanese
Version" at http://unifoundry.com/unifont/ to examine those glyphs.
More about this also appears at http://unifoundry.com/japanese/.

Thank you,


Paul Hardy

[fontforge-devel] Minor Bug & Proposed Unifont Change

[Paul H. <uni...@gm...>]

Greetings,

I would like to change the weight of unifont*.ttf files from "Medium"
to "Regular" and would like to make sure this would not cause a
problem with FontForge.  Looking at the FontForge source code, it
appears to look for fonts named "unifont" and "unifont upper" without
further filtering.  Have I overlooked anything?

The change is as per the OpenType recommendation here:

     https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/name

for Name ID field 2, which states:

A font with no distinctive weight or style (e.g. medium weight, not
italic, and OS/2.fsSelection bit 6 set) should use the string
“Regular” as the Font Subfamily name (for English language).


Possible Minor Bug:

The SetFontNames function in FontForge places a space character after
the version number in Name ID field 5.  I found this comment in
fontforge/parsettf.c:

    /* OpenType spec says the version string should begin with "Version " and */
    /*  end with a space and have a number in between */

That comment seems to imply that the version string should begin with
"Version " and end with ' '.  That wording does not appear in the
above-referenced Microsoft OpenType specification.

This section of code in fontforge/parsettf.c in the function
TTF_PSDupsDefault adds a space in the format string "Version %.20s ":

    if ( sf->subfontcnt!=0 || sf->version!=NULL ) {
        if ( sf->subfontcnt!=0 )
            sprintf( versionbuf, "Version %f", sf->cidversion );
        else
            sprintf(versionbuf,"Version %.20s ", sf->version);
        if ( english->names[ttf_version]!=NULL &&
                strcmp(english->names[ttf_version],versionbuf)==0 ) {
            free(english->names[ttf_version]);
            english->names[ttf_version]=NULL;
        }
    }

Note the extra space after the "%.20s" but not after the "%f".  In
fontforge/tottf.c in the function DefaultTTFEnglishNames, spaces are
added after the "%f" and the "%s" format strings:

    if ( dummy->names[ttf_version]==NULL || *dummy->names[ttf_version]=='\0' ) {
        if ( sf->subfontcnt!=0 )
            sprintf( buffer, "Version %f ", (double)sf->cidversion );
        else if ( sf->version!=NULL )
            sprintf(buffer,"Version %.20s ", sf->version);
        else
            strcpy(buffer,"Version 1.0" );
        dummy->names[ttf_version] = copy(buffer);
    }

The trailing space does not get added with SetTTFName for Name ID 5,
only with SetFontNames.

Thank you,


Paul Hardy

Re: [fontforge-devel] Community/development guidelines

[Frank T. <fra...@gm...>]

I have reviewed the page as published and generally concur with its summary
of the present consensus. Thanks for hunting down the prior discussions for
reference.


On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 3:55 AM Fredrick Brennan <cop...@ki...>
wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> I've had this on my hard drive for a while, but finished it today after
> deciding that the work it takes me to explain certain things over and over
> is much longer than the work it would take to just finish the guidelines.
>
> https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/wiki/Community-guidelines
>
> Your input is requested, either here or, I'd prefer, at
> https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/4372
>
> Best,
> Fred Brennan
>
> P.S. I mention in the guidelines that users are free to tweet their fonts,
> either brand new work, or new releases of fonts we haven't mentioned either
> ever or in years, at @FontForge, and I'll retweet them. I was going to
> extend that offer to the list a few weeks ago, but got too busy. So, I
> extend it now!
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>

[fontforge-devel] Community/development guidelines

[Fredrick B. <cop...@ki...>]

Hello everyone!

I've had this on my hard drive for a while, but finished it today after deciding that the work it takes me to explain certain things over and over is much longer than the work it would take to just finish the guidelines.

https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/wiki/Community-guidelines

Your input is requested, either here or, I'd prefer, at https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/4372

Best,
Fred Brennan

P.S. I mention in the guidelines that users are free to tweet their fonts, either brand new work, or new releases of fonts we haven't mentioned either ever or in years, at @FontForge, and I'll retweet them. I was going to extend that offer to the list a few weeks ago, but got too busy. So, I extend it now!

[fontforge-devel] Announcing Libspiro - version libspiro 20200505

[Joe <di...@jo...>]

Spiro is the creation of Raph Levien, which simplifies the drawing of
beautiful curves. Libspiro is a shareable library that can be used by
programs to do the Spiro computations for you.

Main improvements of interest in this release are:

  *	Bugfix for CVE-2019-19847.

  *	Fix a memory access bug/error created earlier by patch 2017oct28.
	Users using tagpoint libspiro20150702 are unaffected by this bug.
	Users using tagpoint libspiro20190731 are recommended to upgrade.

  *	Code improvements and bug fixes for better tagged/spiro results

  *	Several prefetch speed improvements.

To download a *.tar.gz or *.zip copy, please go to:
http://github.com/fontforge/libspiro/releases

[fontforge-devel] Announcing - LibUniNamesList-20200413

[Jose Da S. <di...@jo...>]

These libraries provide names and annotations for Unicode Characters for 
version 13.0 as provided by NamesList.txt which can be found at Unicode.org

Features with this new update are:
- libuninameslist is updated to ver1.7, containing NamesList.txt ver13.0
- libuninameslist-fr is updated to ver1.3, with ListeDesNoms.txt ver13.0
- uninameslist.py is corrected now to ver0.2
- added functions 16..26 targetted for display (1..15 for technical use).

To download a *.tar.gz or *.zip copy, please go to:
https://github.com/fontforge/libuninameslist/releases

To build a copy, you will need to run:
autoreconf -i
automake
./configure    ( option to --enable-frenchlib )
make
sudo make install

...and with further instructions for users to install the python wrapper

Thanks,
Joe

[fontforge-devel] iconv/libiconv name confusion on MacOS w/ Xcode and MacPorts

[David C. <dc...@gm...>]

Hi,

I'm trying to compile FF on MacOS 10.13.6 with the latest Xcode toolchain
and libraries installed with MacPorts.    There are issues with the
[lib]iconv library.   One of two things happen:

1) If I just follow the basic build routine, (i.e. cmake -GNinja .. &&
ninja) then it finds libiconv in /usr/lib/libinconv.dylib, but the linker
for the FF library barfs that it can't find symbols beginning with _lib
while linking encoding.c.o:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:

  "_libiconv", referenced from:

      __FindOrMakeEncoding in encoding.c.o

      _TryEscape in encoding.c.o

      _EncFromUni in encoding.c.o

      _UniFromEnc in encoding.c.o

      _MacStrToUtf8 in macenc.c.o

      _Utf8ToMacStr in macenc.c.o

      __readencstring in parsettf.c.o

      ...

  "_libiconv_close", referenced from:

      _FindUnicharName in encoding.c.o

      __FindOrMakeEncoding in encoding.c.o

      _MacStrToUtf8 in macenc.c.o

      _Utf8ToMacStr in macenc.c.o

      _encmatch in noprefs.c.o

  "_libiconv_open", referenced from:

      _FindUnicharName in encoding.c.o

      __FindOrMakeEncoding in encoding.c.o

      _MacStrToUtf8 in macenc.c.o

      _Utf8ToMacStr in macenc.c.o

      _encmatch in noprefs.c.o

ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64

2). Poking around in the cmake documentation, I found that there are
specific variables to control where cmake looks for libiconv.   If I tell
cmake to use the MacOS ports version of libiconv (which is up to date
@version 1.16) like this:

cmake -DIconv_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/local/include
-DIconv_LIBRARY=/opt/local/lib/libiconv.dylib -GNinja ..

That fixes the first error in 1) but the linker now barks that it can't
find symbols beginning with _iconv while linking other parts of the code
(specifically ucharmap.c):

ndefined symbols for architecture x86_64:

  "_iconv", referenced from:

      _def2u_strncpy in ucharmap.c.o

      _my_iconv_setup in ucharmap.c.o

      _u2def_strncpy in ucharmap.c.o

      _def2u_copy in ucharmap.c.o

      _u2def_copy in ucharmap.c.o

      _def2utf8_copy in ucharmap.c.o

      _utf82def_copy in ucharmap.c.o

There is some information about this name confusion here:

https://mw.gl/posts/libiconv_mac/

I'd be happy to patch this but at this stage I'm not at all sure the best
way.   Can someone who is familiar with the encoding and charmap code
comment here?  It seems to me like ucharmap.c and encoding.c do not adopt a
consistent approach with respect to these function names (?).  That's a
rather superficial observation - I have not yet had time to minutely pick
through the code - I thought it might be more enlightening to ask this list
for ideas.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
David.

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[David C. <dc...@gm...>]

Thank you kindly Jose for your thoughts.

I agree small steps to begin with.  I've been involved with lots of large
codebases where summer interns would come in, write a substantial amount of
code which was buggy and full of warnings, and I would spend a few months
tidying up the mess afterwards.  I never write code in that way.  I'm a
firm believer in small changes towards a goal.  I'm also a big fan of TDD
but I'm guessing there are no unit tests for this project.  It is never too
late.  I can see that FF is a very complex piece of work, so will need 'kid
gloves'.

I see there are a number of crash reports on Github and a large number of
warnings during compilation (mainly incomplete switch statements which is
worrying).  I think these should be addressed first.  I notice when
clicking around the application that odd things happen (the GUI seems to
get very confused for example when there are two windows open
simultaneously).  Other times the close button doesn't work.   I think
these small things should be investigated and fixed.    I'm a big fan of
memory and bug analysis tools so would like to run those when I get up and
running with a local build.

As explained to Fred, I'm currently stuck with a linker issue on MacOS (too
many versions of libiconv).  I hope to get past that shortly.

Regards
David.

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 1:36 AM Jose Da Silva <di...@jo...> wrote:

> Hi David,
> Start with small patches and improvements first instead of trying to
> tackle
> a big monster project. This comes with time as you get more familiar with
> the code. I agree, C is much more interesting.
>
> You may want to take a top-down look (to see the forest), but probably try
> fix from a bottom-up approach. Top down approach can easily fix one thing
> and
> break something else (and there are times where the code flipped one way
> and
> then another) but doing a bottom-up approach, you can fix a number of
> lower-
> level unstable functions that assume data is good (doesn't handle bad data
> well), and also misses a bit of housecleaning along the way.
>
> Keep an eye for improvement, like making code thread-safe/re-entrant code,
> big/little endian, runs well on modern distros and if you can, older
> distros, big/little endian.
>

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Jose Da S. <di...@jo...>]

Hi David,
Start with small patches and improvements first instead of trying to tackle 
a big monster project. This comes with time as you get more familiar with 
the code. I agree, C is much more interesting.

You may want to take a top-down look (to see the forest), but probably try 
fix from a bottom-up approach. Top down approach can easily fix one thing and 
break something else (and there are times where the code flipped one way and 
then another) but doing a bottom-up approach, you can fix a number of lower-
level unstable functions that assume data is good (doesn't handle bad data 
well), and also misses a bit of housecleaning along the way.

Keep an eye for improvement, like making code thread-safe/re-entrant code, 
big/little endian, runs well on modern distros and if you can, older 
distros, big/little endian.

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Jose Da S. <di...@jo...>]

Hi Alexandre,
Welcome aboard. I would suggest start with small patches and make your way 
to bigger and better improvements as your skill improves.

If your strength is in bitmaps, you might want to look at the gutils 
directory and do a diff between 20120731 and today's code in that directory.
There are still a few functions in there that do a lot of assumption, and 
it would be good to improve the code so that it fails cleanly if given bad 
data. For example a bad file, given, then reverse all memory allocated, and 
clean house before exiting. The bmp function is one example that is still 
not touched much yet but could be fortified further.
Once you have an idea of what happens in gutils, it will e easier to move 
to other directories and do further improvments.

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Fred B. <cop...@ki...>]

Mr. Risbud-Vincent:

I will send you privately a similar letter as I sent Mr. Carter.

Thank you for your willingness to help!

Best,
Fred Brennan

On Friday, January 24, 2020 11:10:42 AM PST Alexandre Risbud-Vincent wrote:
> (Please excuse my bad english!)
> Hello,
> If I understood well, your team could use some help on the programming
> side. I am myself pretty good in C, but I am not sure my talents would be
> adequate to help you, as I unfortunately have no experience of working with
> FreeType. Most of my knowledge related to both C and fonts is towards
> bitmapped fonts, which probably would not be of great help. Could I please
> have some details about the help that is needed so I can know if it is in
> my capabilities?
> I thank you very much!
> And sorry again for the bad english... Oh well, at least emails don't
> transmit accents.

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Alexandre Risbud-V. <sim...@gm...>]

(Please excuse my bad english!)
Hello,
If I understood well, your team could use some help on the programming
side. I am myself pretty good in C, but I am not sure my talents would be
adequate to help you, as I unfortunately have no experience of working with
FreeType. Most of my knowledge related to both C and fonts is towards
bitmapped fonts, which probably would not be of great help. Could I please
have some details about the help that is needed so I can know if it is in
my capabilities?
I thank you very much!
And sorry again for the bad english... Oh well, at least emails don't
transmit accents.

Le mer. 22 janv. 2020, à 20 h 26, Fred Brennan <cop...@ki...> a
écrit :

> I can see your email address and have sent you an email.
>
> Thanks for your offer and I hope to work together soon ! :-)
>
> COLR/CPAL is a lot of work but, as I sent you, I have a quite detailed
> plan on
> how to get it in, in multiple phases.
>
> Best,
> Fred Brennan
>
> On Thursday, January 23, 2020 5:25:57 AM PST David Carter wrote:
> > Dear Mr Brennan,
> >
> > I've got 30 years experience of C and C++.  Last 10-15 years or so mainly
> > C++ but C ever present through libraries etc.  I might be rusty on some
> of
> > the obscure parts of C and certainly parts of stdlib,  but I could
> > certainly get by.  I first learnt C in university some 31 years ago - my
> > first proper project was a ray tracing algorithm with multiple shading
> > routines - it was really nifty I remember - I think I've still got the
> code
> > printout somewhere :-) After that I've worked on many C/C++ codebases as
> > part of my career - a few years in comms then in finance.
> >
> > Yes, I can use GDB pretty well.  Mainly used VS in the last few years,
> but
> > started off on VAX, BSD UNIX and Linux machines so the GNU toolchain is
> > still very natural for me.
> >
> > No conscious experience with FreeType.  In truth I have little technical
> > experience of working with fonts.  I will be learning this as a go along
> -
> > through development and through design of my own fonts.
> >
> > I've had a look at the colour font stuff and it looks like there would
> be a
> > lot of work to add it, no?  I mean support for colour pickers and so on.
> > I'm not sure it would be the best thing for me to work on to begin with
> but
> > I'm happy to try, if you are desperate!  Please be aware that due to
> other
> > commitments and so forth (see my original email) my input is possibly
> going
> > to be a little sporadic at least for the foreseeable.  I was thinking it
> > might be better for me to operate in lone wolf mode for the first few
> > months to get up to speed on the codebase and contribution mechanism.
> >
> > If you want please contact me off list - can you see my e-mail address on
> > my postings here?
> >
> > Best wishes,
> > David.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Fred B. <cop...@ki...>]

I can see your email address and have sent you an email.

Thanks for your offer and I hope to work together soon ! :-)

COLR/CPAL is a lot of work but, as I sent you, I have a quite detailed plan on 
how to get it in, in multiple phases.

Best,
Fred Brennan

On Thursday, January 23, 2020 5:25:57 AM PST David Carter wrote:
> Dear Mr Brennan,
> 
> I've got 30 years experience of C and C++.  Last 10-15 years or so mainly
> C++ but C ever present through libraries etc.  I might be rusty on some of
> the obscure parts of C and certainly parts of stdlib,  but I could
> certainly get by.  I first learnt C in university some 31 years ago - my
> first proper project was a ray tracing algorithm with multiple shading
> routines - it was really nifty I remember - I think I've still got the code
> printout somewhere :-) After that I've worked on many C/C++ codebases as
> part of my career - a few years in comms then in finance.
> 
> Yes, I can use GDB pretty well.  Mainly used VS in the last few years, but
> started off on VAX, BSD UNIX and Linux machines so the GNU toolchain is
> still very natural for me.
> 
> No conscious experience with FreeType.  In truth I have little technical
> experience of working with fonts.  I will be learning this as a go along -
> through development and through design of my own fonts.
> 
> I've had a look at the colour font stuff and it looks like there would be a
> lot of work to add it, no?  I mean support for colour pickers and so on.
> I'm not sure it would be the best thing for me to work on to begin with but
> I'm happy to try, if you are desperate!  Please be aware that due to other
> commitments and so forth (see my original email) my input is possibly going
> to be a little sporadic at least for the foreseeable.  I was thinking it
> might be better for me to operate in lone wolf mode for the first few
> months to get up to speed on the codebase and contribution mechanism.
> 
> If you want please contact me off list - can you see my e-mail address on
> my postings here?
> 
> Best wishes,
> David.

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[David C. <dc...@gm...>]

Dear Mr Brennan,

I've got 30 years experience of C and C++.  Last 10-15 years or so mainly
C++ but C ever present through libraries etc.  I might be rusty on some of
the obscure parts of C and certainly parts of stdlib,  but I could
certainly get by.  I first learnt C in university some 31 years ago - my
first proper project was a ray tracing algorithm with multiple shading
routines - it was really nifty I remember - I think I've still got the code
printout somewhere :-) After that I've worked on many C/C++ codebases as
part of my career - a few years in comms then in finance.

Yes, I can use GDB pretty well.  Mainly used VS in the last few years, but
started off on VAX, BSD UNIX and Linux machines so the GNU toolchain is
still very natural for me.

No conscious experience with FreeType.  In truth I have little technical
experience of working with fonts.  I will be learning this as a go along -
through development and through design of my own fonts.

I've had a look at the colour font stuff and it looks like there would be a
lot of work to add it, no?  I mean support for colour pickers and so on.
I'm not sure it would be the best thing for me to work on to begin with but
I'm happy to try, if you are desperate!  Please be aware that due to other
commitments and so forth (see my original email) my input is possibly going
to be a little sporadic at least for the foreseeable.  I was thinking it
might be better for me to operate in lone wolf mode for the first few
months to get up to speed on the codebase and contribution mechanism.

If you want please contact me off list - can you see my e-mail address on
my postings here?

Best wishes,
David.

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 5:14 AM Fred Brennan <cop...@ki...> wrote:

> Mr. Carter:
>
> How good are you at C?
>
> Do you have experience with FreeType?
>
> Are you good with the GNU Debugger?
>
> Would you like to help me add emoji font support (COLR/CPAL) to FontForge?
>
> Best,
> Fred Brennan
>
> On Wednesday, January 22, 2020 7:23:27 AM PST David Carter wrote:
> > Hi Frank,
> >
> > Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.  I will peruse this list of
> open
> > items and pick one that I think I can tackle for starters.  I am rather
> > busy at the moment (isn't everyone?) with a business to launch and a
> house
> > and workshop move looming but I want to make this a long term commitment,
> > so will work away at it in the coming months.  What I'm saying is that it
> > may take me a bit of time to get up to speed on the code and the method
> of
> > working, but I will stick with it.  I think FF seems like a potentially
> > awesome piece of software that is worthy of developing and I am looking
> for
> > a C-based project (it could have also been C++, but I think on balance C
> is
> > much more interesting in many ways) to keep my skills honed.
> >
> > My workflow at the moment is rather general and simple viz-a-viz font
> > design - I need to create some proprietary fonts for use in logos, and
> > also, looking at some tutorials, I think mixing calligraphy and font
> design
> > seems like a super-rich vein of inspiration and design ideas, but how
> this
> > all bears on FF is very general really - I'm happy to make contributions
> in
> > any way I can at this stage.   This is to say that it seems that FF
> > currently provides nearly everything that I could need and heaps more
> > besides.  That said I logged a support request on SF today to see if
> anyone
> > knows if dashed/blue/feint guidelines were possible in the Guides layer,
> so
> > if that turns out to not be possible then I could potentially work on
> that,
> > but I need to walk before I can run.  Meanwhile, I see there are 112 open
> > bugs and 43 crash reports logged so they seem like a more useful place to
> > start, to get familiar with the codebase and the contributing mechanisms.
> >
> > WIth kind regards,
> > David Carter.
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Fred B. <cop...@ki...>]

Mr. Carter:

How good are you at C?

Do you have experience with FreeType?

Are you good with the GNU Debugger?

Would you like to help me add emoji font support (COLR/CPAL) to FontForge?

Best,
Fred Brennan

On Wednesday, January 22, 2020 7:23:27 AM PST David Carter wrote:
> Hi Frank,
> 
> Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.  I will peruse this list of open
> items and pick one that I think I can tackle for starters.  I am rather
> busy at the moment (isn't everyone?) with a business to launch and a house
> and workshop move looming but I want to make this a long term commitment,
> so will work away at it in the coming months.  What I'm saying is that it
> may take me a bit of time to get up to speed on the code and the method of
> working, but I will stick with it.  I think FF seems like a potentially
> awesome piece of software that is worthy of developing and I am looking for
> a C-based project (it could have also been C++, but I think on balance C is
> much more interesting in many ways) to keep my skills honed.
> 
> My workflow at the moment is rather general and simple viz-a-viz font
> design - I need to create some proprietary fonts for use in logos, and
> also, looking at some tutorials, I think mixing calligraphy and font design
> seems like a super-rich vein of inspiration and design ideas, but how this
> all bears on FF is very general really - I'm happy to make contributions in
> any way I can at this stage.   This is to say that it seems that FF
> currently provides nearly everything that I could need and heaps more
> besides.  That said I logged a support request on SF today to see if anyone
> knows if dashed/blue/feint guidelines were possible in the Guides layer, so
> if that turns out to not be possible then I could potentially work on that,
> but I need to walk before I can run.  Meanwhile, I see there are 112 open
> bugs and 43 crash reports logged so they seem like a more useful place to
> start, to get familiar with the codebase and the contributing mechanisms.
> 
> WIth kind regards,
> David Carter.

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[David C. <dc...@gm...>]

Hi Frank,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.  I will peruse this list of open
items and pick one that I think I can tackle for starters.  I am rather
busy at the moment (isn't everyone?) with a business to launch and a house
and workshop move looming but I want to make this a long term commitment,
so will work away at it in the coming months.  What I'm saying is that it
may take me a bit of time to get up to speed on the code and the method of
working, but I will stick with it.  I think FF seems like a potentially
awesome piece of software that is worthy of developing and I am looking for
a C-based project (it could have also been C++, but I think on balance C is
much more interesting in many ways) to keep my skills honed.

My workflow at the moment is rather general and simple viz-a-viz font
design - I need to create some proprietary fonts for use in logos, and
also, looking at some tutorials, I think mixing calligraphy and font design
seems like a super-rich vein of inspiration and design ideas, but how this
all bears on FF is very general really - I'm happy to make contributions in
any way I can at this stage.   This is to say that it seems that FF
currently provides nearly everything that I could need and heaps more
besides.  That said I logged a support request on SF today to see if anyone
knows if dashed/blue/feint guidelines were possible in the Guides layer, so
if that turns out to not be possible then I could potentially work on that,
but I need to walk before I can run.  Meanwhile, I see there are 112 open
bugs and 43 crash reports logged so they seem like a more useful place to
start, to get familiar with the codebase and the contributing mechanisms.

WIth kind regards,
David Carter.

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 7:50 PM Frank Trampe <fra...@gm...> wrote:

> Hi, David.
>
> We're hopelessly undermanned, and your skills seem applicable; we'd love
> to have your help. Most people ultimately work on things that benefit their
> own workflows. Is there something in particular that you would like to fix
> or to add? If not, just take a look at the issue tracker
> <https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues> for something to do and
> CONTRIBUTING.md
> <https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md> for
> how to do it.
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 1:23 PM David Carter <dc...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> Dear Sir,
>>
>> I've just downloaded and started to use FontForge - it looks pretty nifty!
>>
>> I wonder if you need any development help?  I have around 30 years of
>> C/C++/Python work experience and I have several degrees in Computer Science
>> and Mathematics subjects.  I have a general interest in design and in
>> particular lettering, calligraphy and font design.  I also know TeX pretty
>> well.  I've got QA experience too, and lots of debugging experience.   I've
>> also worked on large codebases where we used bug and memory analysis tools
>> like Valgrind, Flexelint, Coverity and Purify to hunt down elusive bugs.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> fontforge-devel mailing list
>> fon...@li...
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
>> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>

Re: [fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[Frank T. <fra...@gm...>]

Hi, David.

We're hopelessly undermanned, and your skills seem applicable; we'd love to
have your help. Most people ultimately work on things that benefit their
own workflows. Is there something in particular that you would like to fix
or to add? If not, just take a look at the issue tracker
<https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues> for something to do and
CONTRIBUTING.md
<https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md> for
how to do it.


On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 1:23 PM David Carter <dc...@gm...> wrote:

> Dear Sir,
>
> I've just downloaded and started to use FontForge - it looks pretty nifty!
>
> I wonder if you need any development help?  I have around 30 years of
> C/C++/Python work experience and I have several degrees in Computer Science
> and Mathematics subjects.  I have a general interest in design and in
> particular lettering, calligraphy and font design.  I also know TeX pretty
> well.  I've got QA experience too, and lots of debugging experience.   I've
> also worked on large codebases where we used bug and memory analysis tools
> like Valgrind, Flexelint, Coverity and Purify to hunt down elusive bugs.
>
> Thanks,
> David.
>
> _______________________________________________
> fontforge-devel mailing list
> fon...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
> http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/Developer-f3.html
>

[fontforge-devel] Any help needed right now?

[David C. <dc...@gm...>]

Dear Sir,

I've just downloaded and started to use FontForge - it looks pretty nifty!

I wonder if you need any development help?  I have around 30 years of
C/C++/Python work experience and I have several degrees in Computer Science
and Mathematics subjects.  I have a general interest in design and in
particular lettering, calligraphy and font design.  I also know TeX pretty
well.  I've got QA experience too, and lots of debugging experience.   I've
also worked on large codebases where we used bug and memory analysis tools
like Valgrind, Flexelint, Coverity and Purify to hunt down elusive bugs.

Thanks,
David.