Opening & Saving options

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Posted by: John Hudson
         
Si, Andrei,

Thanks for making this available, and for inviting me to test VOLT. I haven't seriously tried to break anything yet, but a couple of questions and possible feature requests immediately suggest themselves.

From the Release Notes:

    After VOLT has started, load a .ttf file
    into it.

I succeeded in doing this, but thought I would also try opening an Adobe .otf file. This worked fine until I tried to access the Edit Glyphs window; at this point VOLT chrashed:

    Run-time error '-2147467259 (80004005)
    Method '~' of object '~' failed

Will VOLT be able to handle Postscript flavour OT fonts? I would classify this as a fairly essential feature and, since this is a fairly basic aspect of the OT spec, it is something users will expect.

Continuing in the same portion of the Release Notes:

    NB: VOLT erases all OTL tables... previously
    present in the font. You cannot start an
    OpenType Layout project in OTL assembly and
    continue it in VOLT. It has to be done entirely
    in VOLT.

This is a little unclear. Will VOLT dump the OTL tables in _any_ font it opens, including fonts which have been built using VOLT? This seems to me a very serious drawback, particularly since it only seems to be possible to save as a .ttf or .otf file. This suggests that not only must you use VOLT exclusively to build OTL tables, but you must do it all at once and get it right the first time. Eek!

It isn't clear from the Release Notes if there is, in fact, any way to save and re-open a project in progress. Is there? I would rate this very highly as a desirable feature.

It would also be very useful to be able to save collections of features and apply them to other fonts. This would greatly speed up production of GSUB tables, in particular, for fonts in the same family, or for any fonts which have identical glyph sets.

Have you considered making a VOLT file format for saving work in progress?

John

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Andrei
         

Hello John,

1. VOLT is TIDE-based and TIDE (Typography Integrated Development Environment) currently does not include a PostScript rasterizer. So as soon as you tried to show a glyph it failed. I will put a nicer message in, but the scope is the same.

It is quite possible that a PS rasterizer will be added to TIDE in the future. This would immidiately allow VOLT to work with PS-based fonts.

2. Of course you can save and reload your projects! It would be quite silly of us if we made a tool where you cannot save, reload and keep working.

VOLT saves its data into a temporary table inside the TTF; this table is removed when the font is "shipped".

The message you saw only appears when you open a font in VOLT for the first time. It is to warn you that you cannot switch freely between VOLT and raw OT assembly. VOLT usually keps more data around (to make its interface more user-friendly), so the translation to OT assembly is not reversible.

Thanks -- Andrei

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Andrei
         

Concerning saving collections of features:

- you can save lookups. That's where the bultk of the work is. Once you have all lookups in place, constructing a feature tree is a matter of minutes.

- It is rather hard to define what saving a "feature" means. Should I save all lookups referenced by it? What about lookup order, how does it get preserved? what if two features referenced the same lookup? (e.g.  and both use a lookup that produces smaller variants of letters) and so on. Being able to save features would give one a false sense of simplicity.

- It is suggested that the font developer concentrates on getting the correct sequence of lookups first. Here attention has to be paid on the correct ordering of lookups, lookup interaction (e.g. do not do mark positioning before kerning is done) etc. Basically, one has to think it through how the font is processed by the OTL engine. Once this is done, one shuffles lookups between features.

Thanks -- Andrei

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Andrei
         

And yes, I know that my "release notes" are very much "alpha quality". Simon is working on a more reasonable user guide, but that takes time. I hope to compensate for the quality of the notes (or create even more confusion on this board.

Thanks --Andrei, the challenged technical writer 

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Si
         
With regard to a PostScript rasterizer TIDE service. I sent mail to Adobe yesterday regarding this. I'll let you know when I get their response.

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