[Devel] Info: Apple OSX Font Tools Suite 1.0.0 Released

[Peter Lofting]

Cupertino 11/8/02: Today the Apple Font Group released its new suite 
of Unix command line font tools for OSX.

These can be downloaded free from http://developer.apple.com/fonts/. 
The automatically installed 4.8 Mb package includes the tools, user 
documentation, and a 60-page tutorial.
To use this package, you need to be running OSX 10.2. Everything is 
automatically configured by the installer. You just add fonts to 
taste.

Working with text sources for many of the tables in an sfnt font 
structure is a powerful and efficient way to develop, debug and 
manage font sources. E.g. use ftxdumperfuser to solve cmap and 
postname glitches once and for all in .ttf, .otf and CFF format fonts.

With this release, Apple has converted its text dump formats to XML 
and will be continuing to refine the XML formats in future releases.

No previous experience of Unix is necessary as the 60-page tutorial 
takes you step-by-step through useful font editing proceses with an 
accompanying set of ready-worked live demo files.

Applications in The Font Tool Suite are:

*       ftxanalyzer
*       ftxdiff
*       ftxdumperfuser
*       ftxenhancer
*       ftxinstalledfonts
*       ftxruler
*       ftxvalidator

Documents included:

*       The Apple Font Tool Suite Manual (51 pages)
*       Tool Quick Reference (8 pages)

*       Tutorial (62 pages)
*       Tutorial Command Summary (8 pages)