[Freebangfont-devel] Update on MS font validator

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Tuesday 12 November 2002 11:22 am, Anirban Mitra wrote:

>   Meanwhile I have investigated why my fonts are not
> working in WINNT. Simon Daniels of Microsoft
> Typography has tested the font Mukti in their Font
> Validator Tool [ It is a program they are giving to
> font devlopers gratis, even postage paid! However I
> could not take the offer as I work in Windows 98 and
> the tool requires minimum Windows2000 sp3.Deepayan,
> you can try this] and have send me a detailed error
> report. ...

I have installed the Font Validator Tool on my Win2k partition. (I also had to 
install the .Net framework, which was a bit scary, but I did it anyway...)

Running it I got (and can easily get for any future font files) XML files for 
each font, and a common XSLT file. 

The XML showed up well enough in IE 6. The good news is that in an unexpected 
departure from tradition, the XML and XSL seems to be standards compliant 
(except for some garbage characters in the beginning), and after copying them 
over to Linux, xalan happily transformed the XML to HTML. The HTML looks just 
fine in Mozilla (1.1), Konqueror (3.1beta) and Opera (6.03), though I haven't 
tried any Windows browsers (but even on Netscape 4.7 it's readable). Even the 
Javascript works in Konqueror, though not in the others. (For the record, 
Mozilla doesn't seem to be able to render the XML directly.)

Anyway, the resulting files are largish (of the order of 150-200 K), so I'm 
not attaching them here. Instead, I've put them at

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/FVT/

I am happy to check any other fonts the same way.

Deepayan


P.S.: The contents of these results are mostly greek to me, so any 
interpretaions would be welcome. Also a comment on Mukti: it's not recognized 
as a font file in Win2k, and although Pafedit loads the ttf and saves a sfd 
file from it, it then segfaults when trying to load the sfd file again.