Unhelpful error message

[vanisaac]

I am creating a font implementing a complex script as a demonstration of an encoding model to the Unicode Technical Committee. I am getting a strange and incredibly unhelpful error message when I try to compile - "Microsoft VOLT: Compilation failed".

The font contains approximately 100 contextual substitution lookups and 50 positioning, and was created in Font Creator Program 5.0 & VOLT 1.3.254.

It had previously compiled for proofing just fine - I had gone in to fix (logically) some of the contextual subs, and had combined a few together, removing the now superfluous lookups. I have removed all of the altered lookups from the font and tried to compile, and have received the same error.

Is there any way to know what this error is? Is there a utility that would enable me to see if my OT tables are somehow corrupted, or is this a memory problem of some sort?

[vanisaac]

Ok, I reverted my font to a previous version - I save working backup versions every time I complete a section of logic- and have now run into a different problem: Glyph groups used in lookup X have different cardinalities. First, does "cardinalities" refer to the number of members in the group? Second, if this is the case, the problem is due to the fact that I have glyphs that merge to a single variant in certain contexts, meaning that VOLT reduces my lookups from six member 1:[a b c d e f] -> 2:[g h i j k k] to six and five 1:[a b c d e f] -> 2:[g h i j k]. I have tried to replace one of the instances of [k] in group 2 with a group <k> containing [k] to no avail. Am I barking up the right tree?

PS, due to a reorganization of the logical structure, the former brute force 70+ substitutions (each context having its own sub) have been reduced to 18 split function substitutions with 12 additional ligature, decomp, and contextual variant subs. The 50 positioning lookups remain.

[tiro_hudson]

Cardinality refers to both the number of glyphs in groups and to their order in the font glyph set. In other words, it is not the ordering within in the glyph group in the VOLT UI that matters, but the ordering of the Glyph IDs in the font glyf table.

[vanisaac]

Cardinality refers to both the number of glyphs in groups and to their order in the font glyph set. In other words, it is not the ordering within in the glyph group in the VOLT UI that matters, but the ordering of the Glyph IDs in the font glyf table.

Ugh. That's quite possibly a very unhelpful architectural feature of the OpenType standard. I think I have been very lucky at ordering my glyph variants then. I will keep this little gem in mind for the future.

Thanks for the help.

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