DTD for FV reports?

Posted by: Adam Twardoch

Paul,

while DTD wouldn't make a lot of sense, a XML Schema would. Since you already have experience with building XML schemas (XMLFont), I guess it should be possible to build one for the Validator XML? Actually, a fairly small rewrite of Font Validator would allow it to build a Schema document automatically. The main purpose of such a schema would be to document ALL POSSIBLE variants of errors and warnings that can occur within a Validator XML file. The nice thing is that with a proper XSL stylesheet, the schema would automatically turn into a nicely-formatted documentation for the application.

Therefore, with some XSD-generating code within FV, and with a nice XSL stylesheet, you would get some both human-readable and machine-readable documentation for Validator.

The schema could be used by 3rd-party applications. The applications (e.g. custom scripts for FontLab and TTX/FontTools) could parse the XML output from FV and automatically make fixes to the font, or at least display specific recommendations on how to fix the font.

AFAIR, it is not possible to run FontVal in commandline mode (but may be mistaken). It would be nice if something like this would be possible:

FontVal.exe c:fontsarial.ttf -o d:outarial.xml
or
FontVal.exe e:workarial.fvp -o d:outarial.xml

Alternatively, it would be nice if the XML syntax for the FVP file allowed to optionally specify the file name of the output XML file, plus a switch whether to output the XSL file or not. The FVP file should also contain a switch that tells Font Validator to quit after performing the validation.

In such case, just calling
FontVal.exe e:workarial.fvp
would be enough.

Best,
Adam