[ft-devel] The new Font Validator with rasterization (i.e. hinting) test out now!

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Hi,

I am happy enough with it, so it is out. About 20% of microsoft's own shipped 
fonts on win 8 show some degree of problems in this area, and most of them are 
genuine (although as some suspected, the older 2003 Font Validator is 
occasionally buggy...). It is just that rendering engines silently work around 
these problems. So now you get FreeType to tell you hinting problems it has 
been silently working around for years, in a nutshell, and it largely agrees 
with the (non-buggy part of...) the older Font Validator.

The "ClearType" test mode (obviously not Microsoft ClearType) is hooked up to 
the new sub-pixel hinting mode from Nikolaus Waxweiler debuted in Freetype 
2.6.4.

The new Font Validator requires a patched FreeType (and I bundle it for 
win32/win64 & mac tri-arch) . I used the revised-once patch from Werner 
verbatim, except it needs one extra semi-colon :-). I adjusted the other code 
to go with it. Thanks, Werner.

I built the OS X tri-arch patched FreeType but haven't started testing nor 
packaging around it yet. The speed for win32 is crazy - for one particular 
font, the new Font Validator's rasterization test took:

1.5 minutes under wine + dotnet,
5 minutes under native linux mono
8 minutes under wine + wine-mono (the default config for wine to run dotnet 
binaries)
14 minutes for the older Font Validator under wine + dotnet.

Thus the new Font Validator's rasterization test is about 10 times faster than 
the old. No doubt it is because I currently only implements 6 of the 70+ checks.
And that it runs about 3 times faster in dotnet runtime with wine, than in 
native linux mono. No doubt again it is because mono is slower than genuine 
dotnet runtime, even with a wine overhead.

The code is at [1], the windows/dotnet/mono binaries at [2], and technical 
details in [3]. I'll do the Mac OS X package in a couple of days.

The embedded python interpreter requires dotnet 4+ or mono. So I provide two 
sets of binaries, one for current-ish computers (whichever variety, windows or 
mac/linux + mono), the other for the older dotnet v2.

And please feel free to click the donate button above the download links.

[1] https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator
[2] 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hp-pxl-jetready/files/Microsoft%20Font%20Validator/
[3] https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/issues/5