[Wish] Publishing an XML Schema for FontVal reports

Posted by: Adam Twardoch

Publishing an XML Schema for FontVal reports

I suggest that Microsodt publishes an XML Schema for the Font Validator output. A fairly small rewrite of Font Validator should allow it to build a Schema document automatically. Since Microsoft Typography already has experience with building XML schemas (XMLFont), I guess it should be possible to build one for the Validator XML?

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. You would need to only do it once, and from then on, Font Validator could be self-documenting!

The schema could be used by 3rd-party applications. The applications (e.g. custom scripts for FontLab Studio 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. I know of at least one more developer who'd be interested to integrate FontVal into a validation workflow within FontLab Studio.

Adam