FontForge’s main view and a single glyph’s display. However, it is often useful to look at glyph coordinates, mapping data and glyph metrics, and FontForge does a fine job of that, too. ![]() It’s only occasionally of use with broken fonts, though, as it reports relatively few errors and tends to save out your font in a completely different way to how you first read it in. When it comes to graphically examining or modifying glyph outlines the only real open source choice is FontForge. In addition to the free version, there is a paid version which can also change and save the values in the font. DTL OTMaster shows the OS/2 table of a font. The only thing it doesn’t include is the details of the glyph descriptions for CFF based OpenType fonts. It also offers a tree representing the data structure of the entire font, allowing you to see the values in every table. DTL OTMaster displays renderings of all of the glyphs alongside a single glyph and it’s associated data. You can double-click on any glyph to launch a more detailed view which shows associated data from elsewhere in the font. The first thing it offers is an overview of the glyphs in the font. If you need a general look at the data inside an OpenType font, I can recommend nothing better than Dutch Type Library’s DTL OTMaster. Font validator flagging up the issues in a deliberately broken OS/2 table. It’s still a good place to get a general idea of what could be causing problems, though. For example, many things that OTS rejects are not picked up by Font Validator and vice versa. It’s worth noting that it lacks proper support for CFF based OpenType fonts, and that browsers and Font Validator consider different aspects of the font important. Microsoft’s Font Validator goes through fonts and checks them against a number of rules which are (for the most part) defined in the OpenType specification. It only tells you which table was the reason for the rejection, but this is a good start! OTS rejects a font I deliberately broke and Firefox logs the event in its error console. Unlike Chrome, Firefox actually includes small reports on rejected fonts in its console. The first step is to open Firefox and load a page which uses the font you want to test.īoth Firefox and Chrome use a piece of open source code called the OpenType Sanitiser (OTS) which checks that fonts are properly formed before passing them on to the font renderer. So without further ado, here are 6 tools we use to make sure the fonts we generate will work in browsers. The reasons for this are simple – the formats are almost identical, using the same tables with a slightly different index structure, and there are far more tools available for working with OpenType fonts than WOFF. ![]() ![]() We’ve found that using the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) provides the best support across browsers, and have set this as our default format for generated fonts.ĭespite this, when debugging fonts we generally generate OpenType fonts. ![]() This is a significant challenge due to the wide range of font renderers used by browsers. For PDF to HTML, this means converting a range of fonts in different formats into a format accepted by browsers. One part of writing a PDF converter is making sure that the fonts embedded within the PDF are accessible to the target platform. 6 tools for making fonts work in browsers He's also enjoyed working with SVG, Java 3D, Java FX and Swing. Sam Howard Sam is a developer at IDRsolutions who specialises in font rendering and conversion.
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