Changes (Enhancements & Bug Fixes)

• 13-Nov-2002
  • Two new tools in the outline character view.
    • A hand tool -- for scrolling around
    • A freehand tool -- for having pfaedit try to fit splines to a hand drawn curve
  • MergeFonts was broken from scripts.
  • New Russian UI from Valek.
  • Another remove overlap fix from KANOU.
  • Added code to invoke Internet Explorer (or an Mac App) on the Mac (so pressing F1 should actually load some help on the mac now).
  • Fixed random crash in font generation dialog
  • PS->TTF conversion tried to force splines in cases where it could not.
• 05-Nov-2002
  • Improved behavior of Remove Overlap. Fix inspired by Kanou.
  • Added a "Find Intersections" command, a varient of remove overlap that stops after it finds the intersections. I think this half of the job has no major bugs.
  • If a single point is in the clipboard, then PfaEdit will also export the clipboard as STRING, giving the coordinates of the point. This is to make it easier to refer to the point.
• 04-Nov-2002
  • KDE has the lovely habit of losing some resize events when in continuous resize mode. So I've tweaked the fontview resize code so that it is less dependent on individual events.
  • Added a mode where the user can choose between whether the font shown in the fontview should be scaled so that the em fits in the space provided (this is the old behavior) or so that the bounding box does.
  • Rewrote the knife tool so that it cuts at the end rather than as it goes along. I think this is easier to use.
  • Bug in the generation of format=2 truetype encoding tables (used for CJK fonts).
• 02-Nov-2002
  • Png reading failed on greyscale images with an alpha channel
  • Png now reads mono images as mono.
  • make install (via libtool) didn't work if "." weren't in the PATH.
• 30-Oct-2002
  • GenerateFamily() scripting command had a number of problems.
• 26-Oct-2002
  • The "Apple" checkbox was sometimes (incorrectly) invisible in the Generate Font/Family dialogs
  • Minor improvements to the "Insert Character" dialog (to match umap)
  • Minor tweak to text fields
  • More configuration changes
• 25-Oct-2002
  • Problems when reading an sfd with references to cleaned up characters.
  • Removed code from ttf generation that check for points of inflection (but fixed a couple of bugs in it before doing that).
  • Change the way scripting GenerateFamily behaves. One person has already been unable to figure out how to use it, and I agree that it didn't make much sense the way I had it.
• 24-Oct-2002
  • Change the default configuration process to use dynamic libaries
    • Added "configure.static" which will configure for static libaries (On Mac OS/X the compiler gets internal compiler errors if asked to generate pic code)
  • Enable reading a straight ttf file out of a .bin or .hqx wrapper (ie. doesn't need to be in a resource fork)
  • The Kern Pairs dlg did not show Hebrew/Arabic right to left. Fixed
  • Added a popup menu to Kern Pairs which will allow you to reset a kern pair
  • Added a way to configure the font family used for info messages in the outline and bitmap character views.
  • New man pages which use the macros supported by Sun. Thanks to R. P. Channing Rodgers.
• 22-Oct-2002
  • Initial version of Mac Family (FOND) generation
  • Fix old sfds so that their bad pngs will become bitmaps
  • optimize the fix to draw magnified.
• 21-Oct-2002
  • Verbose addition to scripting broke loops
  • Various changes to make utf8/ucs2 selections work properly with other programs
  • Hebrew/Arabic drag and drop could cause crashes
  • The Increment right side bearing command (Metrics->Set RBearing) set the width to the value rather than incrementing by that value.
  • Fixes for the local encoding being utf8
  • Imported bitmap pngs still were seen as indexed
  • Problems drawing magnified images when the scale factor was 100%
• 20-Oct-2002
  • Updated French and Japanese UI translations
  • Use LC_CTYPE (rather than LC_MESSAGES) to determine the current local encoding
  • If the width line were selected then PfaEdit would sometimes snap cursor movements to an arbetrary x-value (often the axis)
  • KANOU provided a patch which fixes some remove overlap problems.
  • I had broken the generation of pure bitmap sfnts from scripts (7-Sept)
  • Added a verbose mode to scripts (prints script to stdout as it is executed).
• 18-Oct-2002
  • Tweaked metrics view so that null kerning now displays as an empty string rather than "0"
  • If a font contained a kerning pair to a character that was omitted when saving the sfd file, then loading that font would leave it in a bad state and eventually cause a crash. Fixed on both ends (don't generate bad sfds any more, and can deal with them properly when found)
  • Improved the "Insert Character" dialog a bit.
• 17-Oct-2002
  • More work on Ik format files
  • Redid UI for Auto Width/Kern to make it easier for cyrillic/greek users to kern their alphabets.
  • Changed so that CJK encodings will attempt to map directly to a CJK font (rather than going through unicode) when displaying in the fontview.
  • Added a command to join paths
  • KANOU points out that support for mimetype cut/paste (11-Sept) broke cut/paste in scripting.
  • KANOU supplied a patch for the knife tool.
  • KANOU points out that IsVisible didn't work properly if passed a NULL point (it should never be passed a NULL pointer, but if it is no reason not to work correctly).
  • KANOU points out that the UniqueID for ttf files used a bad date.
  • Had the wrong MS language ID for hungarian
  • Some of Luc Devroye's fonts contain a "div" in the FontMatrix. ATM doesn't support this, but it is easy enough to accept. Still don't support a full expression there, just a div.
  • If we read in a gsf font and then generated postscript from that, we weren't able to read in the result.
  • Added an empty glyph-encoding sub-table to mac FONDs
  • Save multiple postscript did not save the first sub-font
  • The second count in BeginChars could be wrong in an sfd file (PfaEdit doesn't care, but I suppose some program might).
  • Add support for local encoding being UTF-8. Prefs now has an option to try and figure out the encoding from the locale
  • Display filenames in the local encoding.
  • There was an erroneous test in simplify which caused PfaEdit to complain about an internal error when in truth all was well.
  • There was a bad test in dumpbdf
  • Export will now allow the user to generate png files (if s/he's got the png libraries)
  • It is possible to invoke Export from a script
• 11-Sept-2002
  • Added a menu in textfields (right mouse button)
  • Added support for STRING_UTF8 selections
  • Added support for "image/png", "image/bmp", "image/eps", "text/plain;charset=ISO-10646-UCS-2", "text/plain;charset=UTF-8"
    • (two image format)
    • (one format for reading spline data)
    • (two more ways of expressing unicode text data)
• 10-Sept-2002
  • Added support for UTF8 in display/print dlg imports.
• 9-Sept-2002
  • Added support for loading Ikarus .IK font files
  • Fixed a divide by zero problem when generating ttfs
  • If you type into the Kern Pairs dlg, it will now scroll to the pairs associated with the character you typed.
• 8-Sept-2002
  • Display crashed on systems without freetype
  • my xfig reader didn't handle arcs
  • Merge fonts and Interpolate fonts didn't merge/interpolate kerning pairs
• 7-Sept-2002
  • The ruler tool will give the length of a spline if applied between the spline's endpoints
  • Made PfaEdit a little smarter about when to change the xuid field.
  • Added a dlg to display fonts using freetype.
  • Added support for the obselete _XFREE86_GLYPH_RANGES property and then turned it off by default.
  • Improvements to type2 output.
  • Changed greek accents to use 0x384 rather than 0x30d when substituting for 0x301
  • I've found another case where Apple and MS/Adobe disagree on the format of ttf/otf files. So there's now a check box in the Generate dlg which allows you to select between the two defns. I've removed the two different kinds of bitmaps for ttf files, these are now controlled by this new checkbox too.
  • PfaEdit would sometimes in otf files generate curves which should have been done as lines.
  • macbinary resource output broke when I fixed straight resource output the other day.
  • When a grid line was a line but expressed with control points, then pfaedit would get very confused about how to snap to it.
  • Fixed a bug in the generation of ttf/otf fonts with big5/sjis/wansung encodings.
  • The ligature dlg had a bad habit of crashing.
  • On the Mac, Obliqued fonts are stored in a weird postscript format. Try to support them
• 2-Sept-2002
  • When in no-x mode, pfaedit did not notice any arguments (except -script). It will now notice -version, -usage and -help.
  • The PS Names check box would be visible when generating otf fonts. It should not have been.
  • If a font contained multiple encodings for the same character, then generating an otf font from it would crash pfaedit.
  • There is now a proper french translation of the ui (Merci Pierre Hanser!)
  • Under cygwin, PfaEdit would fail to find internet explorer/netscape (because not in user's path) and if it did find them would try to invoke them with a cygwin style name (ie. /usr/local/share/doc/pfaedit/overview.html rather than c:\cygwin\usr/local/share/doc/pfaedit/overview.html )
  • Added a preference item to allow you to control whether a mapping file from glyph ids to character names is produced along with ttf and otf fonts.
• 1-Sept-2002
  • Added an #ifdef to an include file to make it work when built without X11
• 31-August-2002
  • Making a font be a cid-keyed font might screw up all other fontviews and lead to crashes.
  • type1 cid keyed fonts got the wrong fontmatrix if the em-size was something other than 1000. Doesn't seem to make a difference though, we still get bad output for emsize!=1000
  • got maxp.numGlyphs wrong for otf cid-keyed fonts which lacked a .notdef character
  • Added a check to make sure fontnames are less than 63 characters. Needed for ATM.
  • format 2 Coverage tables (used by GPOS and GSUB tables (kerning & ligatures for otf)) were being generated incorrectly. This meant that windows would refuse to read my otf files which had complex kerning. (presumably complex ligs, but I had no test cases). The mac printer driver has also had problems with my otf files. This may be why.
  • Added a popup to the kern pair dlg to tell user how many kern pairs there are, and how many characters start kern pairs.
• 29-August-2002
  • Merge and Elide were backwards
    • And merge (simplify) had problems when a desired spline at the same slope at the start and end (or something like that).
  • Added a field to Review Hints showing the total number of hints, flag for h/vstem3, ability to move points associated with hint when moving hint. also added a hot key for it.
  • Added a Find Problem to detect things which are almost but not quite h/vstem3
  • AutoHint wasn't finding all the ghost hints it should have.
  • Put in (what I hope is) a better way of detecting extranious hints (the hypen case. At first sight the hstem and vstem appear equally valid) remove hints which are wider than they are long.
  • More fixes from KANOU for cid fonts
  • The scale to em checkbox only (sort of) worked if the emsize increased. Fix from KANOU
  • Autohint could go into an infinite loop on characters containing a 0-length spline.
  • Problem with cff name table fix of 27-Aug
  • bdf fonts were loaded into background by default
  • Scripting problem loading bitmap fonts into background.
• 27-August-2002
  • Further attempts to fix the fact that PfaEdit in some ways does not believe that monospaced ttf files are monospaced.
  • Problems with endif
  • Redid the Find Problems dialog by adding tabs so that related problems are grouped together.
  • Added a problem which will report advance widths which do not match some standard value.
  • CID keyed generation was broken again by the (failed) attempt to make things work with FontLab (18-Aug)
  • cff name table could be off by 1 if there were a real notdef character
  • Added ability to display blue zones in outline view.
• 21-August-2002
  • Broke cid-keyed otf generation on 27 July when I enabled the [Stop] button. Fix by KANOU.
  • Bringing up progress indicator early (20 August) broke scripting without X11.
  • Added ability to load a font protected by fstype=2 to a scripting (extra argument to open).
  • Enhanced print abilities.
  • Added ability to Print to scripting.
  • Attempt to fix the fact that windows doesn't recognize my monospaced ttf fonts as monspace.
  • PfaEdit could be confused by strange values of Ascent in the hhea table
  • Added a Round to Int option to the transform dialogs
  • Added ability to change the em-size (and rescale the font) to fontinfo
• 20-August-2002
  • Under KDE my tools palettes are made too wide and without borders. That's ok until they get reparented (docked). Added code in the docking routines to fix these problems.
  • May have fixed a race condition problem due to reparented windows under freebsd.
  • TeX sfd files are a little more complicated than I had originally thought, the parser is now more general.
  • PfaEdit sometimes thought some X fonts had iso8859-1 encoding when they did not.
  • cleaned up some problems with encodings
  • Added support for TeX (actually MetaFont) gf files
  • RLE background images sometimes showed up inverted (with background color as foreground & vice versa)
  • The Fit in window command should now take docked palettes into consideration.
  • Added a Japanese translation of the UI, courtesy of KANOU Hiroki.
  • Added the ability to run mf on a .mf font, generate a gf file, autotrace the gf file, and leave you with a font based on an mf file.
  • Menus now do pointer grabs.
  • Fixed a bug in generating PostScript resource file fonts on Mac OS/X
• 18-August-2002
  • Added a dlg to show all kern pairs (and another to show all ligatures)
  • Added a "Find Problems" item to check for missing bitmaps.
  • Put in some warnings to the ttf parser for bad cmap and glyf tables
  • PfaEdit was still having trouble about loading space bitmaps (that had been generated with freetype).
  • PfaEdit did not set the flag indicating manual hinting after changes by Review Hints or Create Hint. Should be set now.
  • Various small tweaks to the pfa/pfb output because FontLab doesn't like what we currently do. Probably none will make much difference.
  • The Print command would attempt to print characters outside the encoding of type1 fonts. This did not work well.
  • The autowidth command got very confused when given a sans-serif script to autowidth when the Latin characters in the font were serifed.
  • The Print sample text is now ordered so that the language specified in the LANG environment variable comes first in the list.
  • Added $version
  • PfaEdit will now read scripts from stdin if you follow the "-script" argument with "-".
  • Valek points out the using CharInfo to change a character's color did not change it until the fontview was refreshed
  • Expand Stroke had problems when intersections bent the wrong way.
• 9-August-2002
  • I've decided to encourage use of the mailing lists for reporting bugs. A feeble attempt to cut down on the spam I get by removing my e-mail address from the site.
  • Bug in the dlg asking for the resolution of a bdf font. The second (and subsequent) time(s) it came up it would have a good chance of never going away again, and potentially crashing PfaEdit into the bargain. (number of other bugs here too)
  • If the postscript "FontName" contained a hyphen then any generated BDF fonts would have invalid X fontnames (they hyphen would be included which would throw the name parsing off by one hyphen).
  • Greg Ford points out that generating a bdf font and then loading it back in will often change the fontname. This is because the fontname is not actually stored in bdf files. I've added a FONT_NAME property to the bdf fonts I generate.
  • PfaEdit would sometimes forget about the first bitmap character in each bitmap font stored in an sfd file. Please check any sfd files to see if they are missing bitmaps of space, exclamation point, etc. Probably introduced 11-June.
• 8-Aug-2002
  • After yesterday's fix textfields ignored backspaces
  • More work on the metrics lines. There's now a dlg to control which ones get drawn.
  • FontInfo would sometimes crash after adding ttf names.
  • Added minimal ability to dock palettes into their respective views.
  • Added a way of looking at the fontview where there are now holes in the font (ie. a compacted view where every cell contains a glyph). This is just another encoding, but people have been asking for it and it is slightly easier to get to than normal reencoding of a font. Note: It has no defined relationship to the glyph array in a ttf file.
• 7-Aug-2002
  • The 21-July autowidth/kern change broke autowidth/kern scripting.
  • And the serif detection failed if the character I did not reach the baseline.
  • PfaEdit read RGB png files incorrectly.
  • PfaEdit used to bring up most dialogs underneath the cursor. Now it only does that if the focus is set to FocusFollowsMouse, and otherwise centers dlgs.
  • PfaEdit now will draw metrics lines in the fontview if you want it to.
  • PfaEdit remembers what outline character views were open when a font was saved (as an sfd file) and will automagically reopen them when you next load that font.
  • Added View->Find In Font View command to the outline character view. Will scroll the fontview to display the current character.
  • Textfields within PfaEdit ignored the numeric keypad
• 4-Aug-2002
  • Yesterday's resize fix didn't quite work
  • Try to improve conversion of cubic to quadratic spline (actually, we make the conversion worse, but it probably helps rasterizers not to have points quite so close together).
  • Some more work on the TTF style name
• 3-Aug-2002
  • Failed to read ttf fontnames properly for some dfonts (probably some ttc files as well)
  • Didn't position references by point matching properly (when loading from ttf)
  • removed some debugging code inadvertantly left in after the rle fix.
  • Added support for X Input Methods (to do CJK character input properly)
    This only works if X_HAVE_UTF8_STRING is defined -- an XFree 4.0.2 extension (ie. not on solaris)
  • Added a possible fix to a resizing problem for some window managers.
  • Added CIDFlattenByCMap function to scripting.
• Earlier Changes