Font Validator 2.1.5 is out

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Release note of 2.1.5 at the bottom - It has been 18 months since 2.1.4. The 
good thing since 2.1.4 is that I finally got round to work on the C# part of 
Font Validator (instead of fixing up missing components, and etc), the part 
which were open-sourced by Microsoft, so there are some small but general 
improvements in processing many of the opentype tables.

Mac OS X support (and Apple's tightening security with 10.14/10.15) continues 
to be a challenge - there are a few in-progress patches to mono. Command-line 
tool is now out, but I'll need to work with Georg a bit more to get the GUI out 
(when he has time). The longer term solution would probably be for me to pay 
for a signing certficate and learn to use it, to conform to recent tighter 
security and requirement of digitial signatures for binaries shipped to run on 
Mac OS X.

The most exciting event since 2.1.4, and in the near future, is the increased 
maturity of Darling (a project similar to WINE, but for Mac OS X - a SHIM/ 
emulation layer for running Mac OS X binaries on Linux). With a bit of effort, 
and again a few patch-series to various parts of darling, I managed to run the 
bulk of Apple's Font Tools, including Apple's command-line font validating 
tool, ftxvalidator, under darling somewhat. The interesting part is gaining 
insights about what Apple's font system like or dislike, etc. I hope to put the 
details out at https://github.com/HinTak/ftx-darling including links to the 
patch series, out soon. And since we are friendly with the FreeType folks, got 
the C# code from Microsoft, we are getting closer to covering quirks and 
preferences of font systems on all the major platforms.

So grab 2.1.5 :
https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/releases

and libre font owners, have a look at the subset reports at (was for fedora, 
ubuntu; and now raspbian too):
https://github.com/HinTak/FontVal-Tests-at-10pt/

and lastly, if you find it useful, and/or especially given the Mac OS X 
certificate issue, consider making a donation:
https://sourceforge.net/p/hp-pxl-jetready/donate/

FontVal 2.1.5 , Jun  9 2020
=============

- No functionality change in the Freetype backend, other than passsively
  upgrading to VER-2-10-1-71-g4b08cdf78 based on 2.10.1 .

- fixed about a dozen of issues /improvements on OS/2, cmap, head, hmtx,
  name tables.

- Thanks Miguel Sousa for patches, Stevan White for many of the issues
  with SMP / large font sets, and Georg Seifert and Rich Fitzgerald on
  Mac OS X related issues.

- Mac binary now based on patched mono
  ( https://github.com/HinTak/mono-modification/ )

- Built and tested on Raspbian too.

- The Mac build tested successfully on darling.