Release-Notes

Font Validator is a tool for testing fonts prior to release.
It was initially developed by Microsoft, to ensure that fonts meet Microsoft's
high quality standards and perform exceptionally well on Microsoft's
platform.

In 2015 the source code was published under the MIT license ([see release
discussion](http://typedrawers.com/discussion/1222/microsoft-font-validato
r-lives))

Most (only?) active development happens at
http://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator .

FontVal 2.1.6 , Jun 16 2020
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- small update on non-NULL FeatureParams.

FontVal 2.1.5 , Jun  9 2020
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- 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.

- fixes crashes under non-English (French/Russian/Portugese) locales.

- 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.

FontVal 2.1.4 , Nov 29 2018
=============

Mostly for fix to https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/issues/39

Since 2.1.3 enabling building with visual studio, the win32+64 binary is now built with visual studio, instead of mono.

Apologies the windows build still shows version at 2.1.2: I forgot to bump the version shown up before tagging. This was noticed while I tested the Linux binaries, so the Linux/OSX binaries had the problem corrected.

FontVal 2.1.3 , Nov 18 2018
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*** Re-implementing Visual Studio buildability

This is mostly a source-only release to signify that FontVal is now buildable with Visual Studio (Express) 2008+ again, after it was broken just before leaving Microsoft 3 years ago.

FontVal 2.1.2 , Sep  6 2018
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Mostly for mono 5.14-based binary rebuild to fix the $PATH bug ( https://github.com/mono/mono/pull/6147 )

Problems related to building and running FontVal with mono 5 is tracked in https://github.com/Microsoft/Font-Validator/issues/53 .

Most windows users should get the win32+64 build, which caters for both 32-bit and 64-bit windows.

However, if strange crashes on 64-bit windows happen ( possibly related to harfbuzz - see https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator/issues/27 ), the win32 build works around such issue by forcing 32-bit mode even on 64-bit windows. I would appreciate people letting me know and also send the font file, if such a crash happens and the usage of the win32 build becomes necessary.

FontVal 2.1.1 , Sep  1 2017
=============

- This is an update from FontVal 2.1 on the FreeType backend only,
  to VER-2-8-100-g587264cfd .

  We now also offer all-in-one command-line binaries for Ubuntu Linux x86_64
  14.04 and 16.04, in addition to Mac OS X. ( Thanks to new functionality
  in mono introduced in 4.6.0 and matured in 4.8.0 in the last 12 months. )
  The Ubuntu 16.04 binary is preferred, as the 14.04 binary is limited
  by older compiler as mentioned in FontVal 2.1.

  - as rasterization tests now work on all major platforms, "+raster-tests"
    will become the default in FontVal 2.2 .

- The windows-only "accept non-ascii font names" fix proved to be troublesome
  and is reverted. Other platforms are not affected and continue to accept
  non-ascii font file names.

Special thanks to Christian Demmer for multiple rounds of patient testing
of the Mac OS X binaries!

FontVal 2.1 , Jul 20 2017
===========

- Backend b70+10.5, based on FreeType 2.8+ (VER-2-8-73-g38bdf22bf)

  - 16 Errors/Warnings in 1.0 which has no FreeType equivalent
    are implemented. This includes incomplete conditionals (e.g.
    IF without THEN) and maths overflows, etc.

  - 15 FreeType-specific additions are added. This includes endless loops
    and backward jumps, etc.

  - C Python wrapper available ( https://github.com/HinTak/freetype-py
    fontval-diag branch ). Perl wrapper in dev.

- Robustness: still produce a report for some seriously buggy fonts

- Speed/Resources improvements:

  - avoid unnecessary repeated processing of identical EBDT/glyf tables
    and rasterization for TTCs
    (down from half-days to an hour or two in some cases)

  - much smaller memory foot-prints for EBDT check
    (down from 15 to 20+ GB RAM to 1 or 2 GB in some extreme cases)

- Windows-only problem fixed: can now accept non-ascii font names
  (2.0 did not, 1.0 did).

- New opentype tables supported: meta (partial)

- glyf table: cope with broken contours with hair pins, and extremely
  tight loops etc and correctly warn those.

- DSIG table: supports stronger cryptographic digest algorithms (Apparently
  Adobe started signing with those). correct previous mis-diagnosis of very
  old TTCs' signature.

- A lot of misc documentation updates.

- Known Caveats:
  - E6053 (Value exceeds capacity of 2 byte number) also warns on
    values exceeding Fixed 2.14 (FontVal 1.0 did not).
  - W6028 (number of twilight points unreasonably large) too frequent/noisy.
  - W6029 (Setting the loop variable to zero is an error) may be withdrawn
          later as ttfauthint does it and there is no known problem, despite
          some apple and macrosoft docs saying so.
  - The check for maths overflows in hinting instructions requires gcc 5+ to
    build, so it is not offered on the Mac OS X backend for the time being.

FontVal 2.0 , Jul 17 2016
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- backend b54, based on FreeType 2.6.4

FontVal 1.1 , Apr 07 2009
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- Microsoft released to Github on Nov 11 2015; incomplete

FontVal 1.0 , Jul 10 2003
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- last known Microsoft's proprietary binary