AFDKO 2.5 has been released.

[Read Roberts (Adobe)]

A new release of the FDK, AFDKO 2.5, has  been posted at:
   http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/

This release finally brings the FDK tools fully up to par with the OpenType specification. The most notable new features are that the FDK now fully supports all GSUB and GPOS lookup categories, and can apply the feature file directives to TTF source fonts to build TTF fonts with OpenType layout tables. The power of the FDK command-line tools can now be applied to building fonts for all scripts, including complex scripts such as Arabic and Indic.

AFDKO 2.5 also supports several of the newer OpenType features:  user-friendly names for stylistic alternate features, and expanded lookup flag settings for use with mark classes. In addition, for CJK fonts, the tools now support Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVSes).

If you're someone who builds or tests fonts, please try it out! (Installation is now working better as well, and there is a command file for Windows that avoids the earlier need to edit environment variables). Note that the AFDKO is tools are all command-line based, and and require some willingness to get technical.

[JamesMontalbano]

You guys must have improved the installation routine, because this is the first version I've been able to successfully install. Thank you.

I tried the much touted Auto Hint routine and I got a message that my outlines were close to Flex and then the AutoHinting proceeded to mangle my outlines. Not a great introduction to the tool. Any advice would be welcome.

[k.l.]

See here: http://typophile.com/node/53445

(Perhaps the default should be changed?)

Karsten

[SeanC]

I've been playing with it for a couple days (well, the FontLab macros, that is) and am pleased with the results. I noticed that the 2.5 auto-hinter takes much longer than v2.0 (by a factor of five at least). This isn't a complaint, as auto-hinting isn't a function I need to perform on a frequent basis, but it makes me wonder if I've configured it improperly.... The results are fine, no error messages, etc. It doesn't seem to matter whether I turn verbose output on or off.

I'm also wondering if it's possible to configure the Fix Startpoints for Spikes macro to run on only the current font/selected glyphs (as opposed to all glyphs in all open fonts). Ctrl-clicking doesn't seem to work for this macro as it does with some of the others.

Thanks for any insights or tips you might have. And of course, thank you for developing and releasing such useful tools.

(Note: I haven't yet had the chance to test this on my Mac install; the above applies to FL5 running under Win XP.)

[Read Roberts (Adobe)]

Hi SeanC;

In the new version, the autohinter is much slower - there is no error in configuration on your part. This is because it used to use a Python library that got the glyph data  from FontLab and operate on in memory. It now uses an external C program, so the data has to be written to a temporary file, and then read back from that file. I did this because the Python library has to be specific to a version of Python, and there were getting to be just to many versions of Python in use to support cost-effectively. (i do know about various ways to do inter-process communication  all in memory, but these methods are all rather flaky under the embedded Python 2.3.5 in Mac FontLab).

I can certainly fix more of the macros to apply to all selected glyphs. If you are into scripting, this is actually just a few more lines in the script file - you are welcome to fix them up as you wish. You can borrow sample logic from the other script files, like AutoHint.py. In the next FDK version, I will add option dialogs to more of the scripts.

[frankiben123]

wow....nice post.....

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