# Changes (Enhancements & Bug Fixes)

Changes since the last release may be found by performing a "cvs log" command on the file stamp.c.

> TEGEUS: Tell me, What is your opinion of Progress? Does it, for example, Exist? Is there ever progression without retrogression? Therefore is it not true that mankind Can more justly be said increasingly to Gress? |  | -- A Phoenix too Frequent Christopher Fry, 1950

> "The trouble is," he said, "is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so. |  | -- Faust Eric Terry Pratchett, 1990

- 29-Apr-2010
  - A new algorithm for stroking splines. Allows the user to specify arbetrary convex polygons as pens as well as more traditional circles (ellipses) and slanted rectangles (calligraphic pens). (It should also produce better results and each resultant contour will have no self-intersections)

    Extended the python interface so you can specify a polygon pen.

  - Add support for the Web Open Font Format (woff) which is basically just an sfnt with its tables compressed and some extra metadata. New pane in Font Info dlg, and python support for that info.
  - Redo Auto Kerning. Add support for automagically generating kerning classes and auto kerning those classes. Rework most of the kerning related dialogs. Provide python interfaces to all this.
  - Compile with libpng1.4.
  - Add two python methods:
    - contour.similar
    - layer.similar

    which allow you to compare two contours (or layers) and specify an error bound on how far they may diverge.

  - Khaled would like access to the math constant table from python. Add a set of fields
    font.math.<math-constant-name> to the font, and a set of fields to the glyph for math kerning, variants and composition.
  - If the method of approximating a cubic spline by subdivision fails, then relax the precision requirements for a match, and try again.
  - Add support for the "style" attribute from svg 1.2.
  - python glyph.ImportOutlines would crash if it were not given a flags argument.
  - Barry reports that the metrics view crashes for him because things in the pairwise kerning subtable pulldown list are sometimes garbage. Mmm. This can happen if the user has a metrics view open and then uses font info to delete a kerning subtable (or lookup). (And presses [OK] in fontinfo).
  - Suppress warnings about 'showpage' operator when importing PS files.
  - I have been trying for years to figure out how to apply least-squares to this problem. I kept having 4 equations and 2 unknowns. An over specified system with no solutions. I realized last night that I was looking at the problem wrong (of course). Instead of seperating it into x and y components and minimizing errors in each, I should have been minimizing the sum of the x and y errors. Simple. Worked first try. Makes stroking about 10-15 times faster.
  - When doing square pens or polygons then long bendy splines will be broken up roughly every 90 degrees (every time we switch verteces, actually). That turns out to be a good thing (makes it easier to approximate the curve). It doesn't happen automagically for circle pens, so add a little bit of code that detects 90 degree slope transitions and inserts a point there. Results are more accurate now.
  - The various dialogs involving the fontview did not resize properly when the user changed the display size.
  - FF failed to put a trailing NUL on some strings for glyph classes resulting in strange displays (and complaints from pango about bad utf8 strings).
  - Patch by François Charette to allow UTF8 to be spelled as "utf8" in locales.
  - Some users don't like having the character representation of a glyph name showing up in lists of glyph names, so add a preference item: Prefs->Font Info->AddCharToNameList to let them turn that off.
  - If you have freetype rasterizing in the metrics view, and if you are working on a cubic layer, nd if you are editing a glyph in a char view and looking at it in the metrics view, and if you make a change to the glyph -- then Undo doesn't do what you expect. Instead the glyph gets autohinted (by default) before a font is generated for freetype, and a hint undo gets added to the undo list. Undo undoes the hint change (which the user probably isn't aware of) and leaves his/her changes untouched.
  - Andrew Robbins points out that when generating an svg font the unicode-range attribute should look like U+0020-0E4A rather than U+0020-U+0E4A (no second U+).
  - d binderman points out a missing closedir.
    Also d binderman points out that I was missing an fclose in archive processing.
  - FontForge failed to handle archives with double extensions (like ".tar.bz2").
  - Typo in code for parsing extenders in tfm file.
  - The python operators which tested if two contours were equivalent would crash when called.
  - Add a "dup()" member to Points, Layers and Contours to produce a deep copy of the object.
  - The default __iter__ for a selection type (in python) didn't work. It was supposed to return all the selected encoding slots (that is, numbers) instead it returned the empty set (when I tested it, actually it's return would be random depending on an uninitialized variable).
  - Some seemingly valid bdf fonts were rejected. Thanks to Andrey V. Panov for providing a sample.
  - Patch from Alan Coopersmith to fix "showttf -verbose filename" behavior.
  - Khaled Hosny spots duplicate "Descent" fields written to sfd files.
  - When generating a cursive attachment anchor lookup fontforge did two passes through the glyph list. The first did everything needed. And the second thought it was handling marks (rather than cursives) and produced garbage.
  - The clockwise check sometimes gave up when it should not have.
  - When generating a feature file for a mark to mark lookup fontforge could generate gibberish.
  - Three bugs in reading feature files:
    1. FF dereference garbage (and probably, but not necessarily) crash when parsing a glyph class with no glyphs in it inside an anchor specification.
    2. When freeing data describing a list of anchors FF would crash if one of the anchors were defined to be NULL
    3. A multiple substitution entry with just a single element in it looks exactly like a single substitution. FF would complain about multiple substitution lookups containing both single and multiple entries.
  - Hot keys for the grid fit Bigger/Smaller pointsize menu commands got lost when I merged in the mingw changes. (Not saying the fault lies with the mingw people, that's just when they vanished. I might have removed them myself).
  - The bluezones weren't marked in the charview when hinting display was turned off. Patch by Michal Nowakowski.
  - Merge fonts doesn't merge bitmap strikes if one font has a different number of strikes than the other. Patch by Won-Kyu Park.
  - Jeff Harmon reports that ff writes "Postscript" into PFM files rather than "PostScript" and that this matters. Change all instances of "Postscript" to "PostScript".
  - FF crashes if asked to produce a small-caps variant of a lower case letter for which there is no corresponding upper case. Patch from Rogerio Brito via debian.
  - Some time ago MS put in a patch to their OS so that they would refuse to load a font with a name table >5K. They have now decided that was an error http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978909/ And have removed the limitation.

    So remove the warning ff used to generate about name tables bigger than 5K.

  - Complain when the user attempts to put a unicode copyright symbol into the copyright string of a PostScript font.
  - The Hint->Edit cvt dlg would crash if you resized the dlg window.
  - Couple of patches from Louis Simard:
    1. in the kern class dlg, if classes were very long then could segfault when displaying popup messages listing both first and second class members.
    2. Would complain that the special case string "{Everything Else}" was a missing glyph.
    3. Would crash when switching from a newly-created First class entry directly to the <FNew> entry at the bottom of the Second class column.
  - MatixEdits with up/down buttons never enabled the down button.
  - FF could display multiline utf8 textfield strings incorrectly.
  - Updated Vietnamese translation from Clytie. He also fixes various typos on my part.
  - Added a new python function to the module: fontforge.unitShape(n) which returns a contour containing a regular n-gon.
  - Grab many patches from the mingw build. I did not grab the winmmap files because I'm not sure what the license is for that.
  - Patch by Michal to remove some hard coded colors in the ff ui (mostly yellow for selections and black for text).
  - If FF had to split a GPOS pairwise kerning subtable into several bits (because it was bigger than 65535) then ff would go into an infinite loop -- at least sometimes.
  - Fix another place where I was using strcpy against the spec.
  - When doing a Rename to Namelist operation prior to generating a font, FF neglected to clear the glyph-name hash table. This meant that any glyph lookups by name on renamed glyphs would fail. Meaning we would inexplicably lose substitutions.
  - On 64 bit machines, in a contextual chaining display, nested lookups were not shown by name.
  - When FF lists glyph names, it appends the unicode character of the glyph after the name. It probably should not do that if the glyph name maps to the private use area -- if the display font has a glyph there, it probably won't match the one in the designed font and will just add confusion.
  - In a list of a simple substitution subtable the arrow between glyphs was pointing the wrong way so it looked as if the replacement glyph became the source glyph.
  - At Kevin Fenzi's request warn about use of seac instructions in type2 charstrings. Similarly warn about other type1 but not type2 operators (we warned about some. I think I'm now warning about all).
  - New copyright notices for 2010.
  - Unicode 5.2
  - FontForge had no error checking for bad GIDs in the JSTF table.
  - A bad 'kern' table could send fontforge into an infinite loop.
  - Patch from Stephen Hartke, contour slicing still not working properly.
  - More patches from Barry to make ff work with Python 3
  - Annie Olsen of SIL says that the big tick marks in the rulers in the glyph window aren't obvious enough. So make them longer and of a different color.
  - Patch by Tilman Blumenbach. Legacy scripting GetPrefs crashed when asked about "AutotraceArgs".
  - Patch by Khaled to add an optional flags argument to the python glyph.importOutlines()
  - Patch from Alexey Kryukov to make legacy scripting commands GetAnchorPoints and AddAnchorPoint to be consistant.
  - Patch by Martin Hosken to fix some problems with UFO metrics output.
  - Patch by Michal Nowakowski to fix an autohinting problem with hint masks.
  - FF used to map the characters U+1D400-U+1D7FF to equivalent ascii (in the appropriate font). Khaled says that Pango can do that for us.
  - Patch by Khaled to add some missing feature tags.
  - Allow the user to provide a python routine which will calculate the optical spacing between two glyphs. Used to override fontforge's default routine when calculating autokern, autowidth and left and right optical bounds.
    fontforge.registerGlyphSeparationHook
  - I recently broke loading sfd files which contain multiple kerning subtables.
  - Rework the other dialogs which use glyph classes (or sets) so that they now use matrix edits (which I hope make more sense) and have better glyph entry, in line with the kerning dlg.
  - The Goto Char dlg now has an option (when executed in the fontview) to merge the new glyph into the selection (before it simply set the selection to the new glyph).
  - Panov complains that the afii* names (and uni* or u*) don't mean much. So when we have a glyph name (or a list of glyph names) append the unicode character itself to the name inside parens. I don't do this everywhere yet, but moving in that direction. (don't do this for glyph names where it is obvious (like "A"), nor for names that might cause parsing confusion (like close paren itself or space)).
  - Add an autokern command to python.
  - Use autokerning idea to find (default) optical bounds when filling up 'lfbd' and 'rtbd'
  - Someone pointed out that Clockwise and CounterClockwise should only be disabled if the selected contours self-intersect, while correct direction should be disabled if there are any intersections.
  - PDF has changed since I last downloaded the spec, and Barry wanted support for Cross-reference streams (which required also supporting object streams).
  - Apple keeps changing the environment. In 10.2 the Option key would produce the keyboard state mask of 0x2000. In 10.4 it produced 0x0008. In 10.6 it again produces 0x2000. Constant change makes it difficult to create a program which will work on all versions of the OS.
  - Patch by Alexey K so that ff will look for (and parse) unicode cmaps when loading fonts from pdf files. Loaded fonts will then have an encoding rather than just being a list of glyphs.
  - Memory bug when generating ttc files with a 'post' table.
  - Barry points out that some fields in OS/2 were set incorrectly if the font were a cff.
  - in winfonts.c under 64 bit mode, the sizeof(FARPROC16) is 8 rather than 4 and this screws up the font dump. We'd already fixed it for FARPROC, but FARPROC16 escaped. Thanks to Alexey.
  - Was writing random memory locations on 64 bit machines when generating ttc files (possibly on 32 machines too, but no crashes involved and valgrind didn't find anything).
  - Several fixes to the resource editor.
  - Alexey suggests that Control + Mouse wheel should Zoom the metrics window just as it does the glyph view.
  - Fix a couple of problems with the Set Point Size dlg of the metrics view.
  - Blending a new Apple MM instance left us in a font with no encoding.
  - The pulldown list in the apple version of the MM dlg did not get set to the correct default value.
  - Attempt to free something that should not have been freed in MM dlg.
  - Loading LastResort.ttf was extremely slow because some glyphs had hundreds of thousands of altunis and whenever we added a new one we went all through that list to check for duplicates. When parsing a standard encoding there won't be any duplicates.
  - More problems reading apple tables from ttc files. Some crashes, etc.
  - Barry wants to have review hints regenerate substitution points and hint masks.
- 11-Sept-2009
  - FontForge will now generate ttc files. It has two options:
    - share a common glyf table (not always possible)
    - Use CFF output.

    There is also a python command font.generateTtc()

  - Barry points out that some fields in OS/2 were set incorrectly if the font were a cff.
  - in winfonts.c under 64 bit mode, the sizeof(FARPROC16) is 8 rather than 4 and this screws up the font dump. We'd already fixed it for FARPROC, but FARPROC16 escaped. Thanks to Alexey.
  - Several fixes to the resource editor.
  - Alexey suggests that Control + Mouse wheel should Zoom the metrics window just as it does the glyph view.
  - Fix a couple of problems with the Set Point Size dlg of the metrics view.
  - Blending a new Apple MM instance left us in a font with no encoding.
  - The pulldown list in the apple version of the MM dlg did not get set to the correct default value.
  - Attempt to free something that should not have been freed in MM dlg.
  - Loading LastResort.ttf was extremely slow because some glyphs had hundreds of thousands of altunis and whenever we added a new one we went all through that list to check for duplicates. When parsing a standard encoding there won't be any duplicates.
  - More problems reading apple tables from ttc files. Some crashes, etc.
  - Barry wants to have review hints regenerate substitution points and hint masks.
  - Clean up some minor issues which show up on Mac 10.6
  - Patch by Alexey to add a NameFromUnicode function to both native and python scripting.
  - Drag & dropping a glyph into the metrics view didn't mark the end of string properly so cruft left over could be displayed.
  - In CharView Element->Join and Element->Correct Direction were turned off when they should not have been.
  - Patch by Khaled to add some feature names to my list and extend the lookup type to which others apply.
  - new python fields:
    - glyph.topaccent
    - glyph.italicCorrection
    - glyph.isExtendedShape
  - Khaled provides a patch. 'Top Accent Pos' value in Glyph Info -> TeX & Math was not being retained when user pressed OK.
  - Alexey points out that wordlists in the metrics view really assumed ASCII letters and didn't handle utf8 well.
  - Patch by Michal to render more strings translateable.
  - See if I can speed up execution of "<glyphname> in <font>"
  - Patch by Alexey K to add two preference items which control features of the autohintor/instructor.
  - Dave Crossland tells me that some security patch to windows considers fonts with a 'name' table bigger than 5K to be insecure (Don't ask me why they think this) and windows will refuse to load any such fonts. This means Windows won't load any font with the Open Font License in the 'name' table. This patch adds three checks:
    1. When generating a font it will let the user know if the name table is too big.
    2. When loading a font in validation mode it will warn if the name table is too big.
    3. Font Info will make a rough approximation to the size of the name table (an approximation which will always be too small) and warn if this approximation is bigger than 5K
  - When opening a ttf file the guideline psuedo-layer was cubic not quadratic.
  - Patch by Michal:
    - Duplicate "Raster Dark Color" in xresources editor.
      "Delta Grid Color" was really meant the second time
    - Duplicate charview->point->tools->rotate menu item.
    - In charview palettes, it was impossible to unset "don't stroke" in freehand
    - Charview->hinting->autohint and Charview->hinting->autoinstr were not
      disabled if guide were the active layer. This resulted in segfaults
    - In GlyphInfo->Unicode, "variant selector" matrix had headers untranslated.
  - Autoinstructor: added aspect-ratio correction for new diagonal code.
  - Autoinstructor: pushes EF2Dot14 values in a more compact manner.
  - In the metricsview Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Redo menu commands all apply to the textfields as well as the glyphs. So don't disable them. It used not to matter because disabling didn't affect the shortcuts, but it does now.
  - `File->X Resource Editor...->FontView->Font Size` was supposed to allow the user to set the size of the glyph labels in the fontview. It didn't. Fixed.
  - Add a new problem (Find Problems) and a new validation state indicative of whether a glyph (or hint mask) has overlapping hints.
  - Patch by Alexandre Prokoudine to make an error message translatable.
  - Patch by Stephen Hartke to make contour splicing (in fontforge's python module) work the way splicing normally does in python.
  - Back in the dark ages adobe provide a set of encodings for the PUA. For instance A.small was encoded into PUA. Nowadays it is thought better to leave A.small unencoded. But if a modern font contained an A.small glyph FontForge would think it should be encoded into the PUA. So I added a preference item to turn off adobe's obsolete names.

    Sadly the preference item wasn't very smart and turned off names like uE001 as well. Fix that.

  - Autoinstructor: made much faster by caching SplinePointListIsClockwise() results.
  - Problem when converting an OpenType contextual subtable to an Apple state machine.
  - If an old-style kerning table kerns glyphs which are outside unicode BMP then windows has problems. Someone provide a patch to check for this. Sadly the patch had a bug which could cause crashes.
  - Autoinstructor: patch from Alexey to fix artifacts caused by diagonal hints at small and medium PPEMs. Code now sets projection vector from the stack, because that's more accurate than using dual projection vector, so some font validators may give warnings due to aspect-ratio-dependent nature of SPVFS.
  - Autoinstructor: Alexey pointed out that inaccurate strong points interpolation caused assymetry of implied perpendicular extremas.
  - I was intended to translate espace_espace_i to space_space_i and espace.small to space.small but that didn't work.
  - When renaming a font to a new namelist I only renamed glyphs, but not the places where glyph names ocurred in lookups or math variants.
  - I used to have a separate set of default Generate [Option] flags for ttf and otf. There's no real need for that, and it's probably a bit confusing, and it makes life hard with ttc files.
  - Typo in code for converting an OpenType contextual sub to an apple state machine.
  - Hunh. If we configured with gb12345 then that encoding appeared twice in the encoding list and the first occurance was broken. Remove the broken occurance.
  - Barry complains that when a feature file creates glyphs which aren't in the encoding then those glyphs aren't visible (until you reencode, of course). This causes confusion. I think the solution is simply to encode the new glyphs.
  - Patch by Michal. Some of the strings for the new delta suggestor were not marked for translation (also resizing the window didn't reset the scrollbar properly).
  - Add a new python method glyph.preserveLayerAsUndo() to add an undo to the undo list which will restore the layer to its current state.
  - embedded bitmaps in CID keyed fonts didn't work.
  - Interpolate fonts would screw up internals if the first font had a layer count which wasn't 2. This would almost certainly cause a crash later.
  - Hunh. Python creates an iterator for my cvt type which doesn't work. So create a real one.
  - Barry wanted a selection field in python glyph.anchorPoints so create a new routine glyph.anchorPointsWithSel()
  - Patch from Peter, python cvt[i] returned an unsigned value.
  - Python cvt.find function crashed if there were no cvt table.
  - Werner suggests that .02 is a better default value for delta checking than .01.
  - When generating a type3 font from a script, ff would convert to type0 if it had a two byte encoding.
  - Werner keeps asking for a clearer header in the GASP part of fontinfo.
  - When generating a temporary font for rasterization purposes, don't output GPOS GSUB, or any AAT tables.
  - Patch by Herbert Duerr. With traditional 'kern' tables, windows has problems with kerning glyphs which do not have BMP encodings. So produce a warning in this case.
  - SVG kerning produced garbage. Two typos. Patch by Simo Kinnunen.
  - Bug in feature file (and hence UFO) output. When outputing a contextual class-based lookup ff would crash if class 0 was unused.
  - Werner requests a command to check when a spline gets very close to the center of a pixel as this might be a candidate for a delta instruction. That is: Grid fit many glyphs at many pixel sizes and see which splines come close to which pixel centers. This is a functional but ugly implementation.
  - Add mnemonics for the first 10 layers (Guide is _0, Back _1, Fore _2, <user layer 1> _3, ...). Guide, Back and Fore already had mnemonics... Now they have two.
  - You can rebind the charview menus separately from the others.

    If you have an entry like:

    >       msgid "CV*Open|Ctl+O"
    >       msgstr "Super+O"

    then that will rebind Open in the charview and nowhere else.

    Note that the string "CV*Open|Ctl+O" will not appear in the pot file, you must add it manually if you want to do this (that's because I don't want people to do this).

    If you have a rebinding for

    >       msgid "Open|Ctl+O"

    and no entry for "CV*Open|Ctl+O" (ie. the common case) then all menus (including the charview) will follow the standard rebinding.

  - When listing all languages used in a script, ff would only look at gpos.
  - When creating an ellipse or rectangle, ff would round the points to be integers -- but it would not refigure the splines after doing that (so the spline polynomials do not actually reach their endpoints causing peculiar errors).
  - When reading a featurefile from a ufo there is no associated fv yet, but there is an associated map. Use the map instead of fv->map when checking encodings.
  - FF was not translating the spiro point menu in charview.
  - Add a mechanism so user can specify a modifier mask to be applied to characters for navigation. Used to be that user typed "a" and the glyph for "a" was selected in the fontview (or the charview shifted to show "a"). No modifier was used. Now I've added "NavigationMask|None" to the pot file for hotkeys. If left as "None" then there will continue to be no modifier. If changed to something like "Super" then the super key must be used.
  - Set Width (Set Right Bearing, etc.) from the fontview would change the width of a glyph even if it were composite with a "use my metrics" reference.
  - If cairo was turned off, and a glyph had background images, then deleting those images (Cut or Clear) in the charview did not update the display. (That's a simplification, but is what it looked like).
  - In python font.save(), if the script does not specify a filename, and the font isn't associated with an sfd file, then generate the same name as used in SaveAs by default.
  - FF can save spiro info into an sfnt. Unfortunately FF didn't read it back in properly.
  - Autoinstructor: patch from Alexey to fix a bug reported by Andrey V. Panov: - sometives the last vertical stem protruded beyond the advance width.
  - Various patches from Michal. Array bounds out of bound kind of thing.
- 22-June-2009
  - Apple seems to have broken the X11 clipboard around 10.5.7. Or so other people tell me. I can't reproduce the issue on my 10.5.7 system.

    I hope I have worked around this by adding a preference item
    File->Preferences->Generic->ExportClipboard
    Turn this Off if the clipboard doesn't seem to work.

    Peter Baker says that a solution is to go into X11 Preferences, click on the "Input" tab, and uncheck "Enable key equivalents under X11".

    Possibly downloading a new set of developer tools will fix it:

          http://developer.apple.com/Tools/
            (then log in, (or become a member & log in, it's free))
          Click on Downloads
          In the "Downloads" side bar, click on "Developer Tools"
          Download and Install 3.1.3

  - Add support for friendly names attached to style set features (New in OTF 1.6).
  - Add support for Mark Sets (New in OTF 1.6)
  - Serhij Dubyk has provided a Ukrainian UI.
  - Alexandre Prokoudine has updated the Russian UI.
  - Updated Polish translation from Michal
  - Various patches from Michal fixing some out of bound array references.
  - Added a cvt.find method to the python cvt object which returns the index in the cvt table of a given value (or -1 if not found).
  - Two issues:
    - Apple has changed the name of the preference file for X11. Annoying. Pointless.
    - Apple (or xorg) has changed the default setting of DISPLAY.

    Together these meant that ff did not use appropriate command keys in the menus.
    I wish Apple wouldn't do pointless changes.

  - When faced with non-integral coordinates ff would sometimes introduce rounding errors so the start and end of a contour were slightly different in type1 output. I think this is now fixed...
  - Fix some problems with the non-linear transform dlg.
  - Add a nltransform method (non-linear transform) to python font, glyph and layer.
  - python simplify could crash.
  - Patch by Michal to fix problem when compiled with long doubles.
  - If used twice, tilepath would screw up memory.
  - Someone wants a Reverse contour direction command (in addition to correct contour direction).
  - The code used to check bounding boxes in otf fonts had a bug which caused it to report a minimum value of 0 when the min value was positive. This meant we got erroneous reports of points outside the font's bounding box in fontlint.
  - The code used to check spline intersections had a typo which occasionally caused erroneous intersections to be reported.
  - fontlint said bad 'glyf' table when it meant bad glyph data in CFF table.
  - If a font had multiple glyphs in the ff clipboard, and we sent that clipboard through X11 (rather than just using the internal clip) then only one glyph would come out on the other side. Provide a mechanism for specifying multiple glyphs in the X clipboard too.
  - Refined fix to 'kern pair loss' problem, reported by Louis Simard. There probably was also a similar 'ligature loss' problem.
  - Fixed buffer overrun when filling GASP with default values.
  - Enlarging Metrics window made the feature pane and kerning values grid illegible.
  - Fixed a bug reported by Louis Simard:
    'Build composite glyph' was enabled in wrong situations and crashed.
  - when saving an sfd after adding a new "kerning by classes" subtable and cancelling its edit dialog.
  - FF crashes just after closing an open spiro contour (by dragging its first point over the last one, and then a bit further).
  - When reading strings from the name table, certain platform/specific settings would cause ff to:
    1. read the wrong string
    2. screw up memory.
  - Consolidate various mechanisms for finding the xHeight/capHeight of a font. Look for flat lines at the top of appropriate glyphs and then snap to the closest bluevalue. If no flat lines, then try curves.
  - Output Cap/X Height into UFO.
  - Add new python commands
    - font.capHeight
    - font.xHeight
  - Was outputting dates within <date> but should be in <string> when generating UFO files.
  - A font with erroneous GSUB tables (referring to non-existant glyphs) and an incomplete set of glyphs (caused by having bitmaps for glyphs without outlines) caused ff to crash.
  - In svg paths, if you omit a command after a 'moveto' then it defaults to a lineto, not another moveto.
  - Add a python font.saveNamelist(filename) command.
  - Jakub Steiner thinks it would be a good idea if the tool bindings of mouse clicks in the glyph editor were sticky across invocations.
  - Werner finds a place where the new jstf code was corrupting memory.
  - Cancelling Element->Validation->Set Extremum Bound caused a crash.
  - When closing a metrics view associated with a CID keyed font, ff would crash.
  - Someone wanted to be able to set both the left and right side bearings at the same time.
  - Patch by Alexey to unlink bitmap code.
  - Barry points out it would be better to use fputs when I use fprintf.
  - If the user didn't have freetype, then the anti-aliased metrics view was faint.
  - Oops, could write but not read styleset names from a feature file.
  - Show Att didn't display cursive anchor positioning anchor classes properly.
  - Panov wants a python function to determine the extent in the x direction of a contour when y is fix. That is, the minimum and maximum values x can attain for a given y. And vice versa.

    Extend this a little so the user can specify a range of y values (return the extent in x when y is between ybottom and ytop).

    - contour.xBoundsAtY(ybottom[,ytop])
    - contour.yBoundsAtX(xleft[,xright])
    - layer.xBoundsAtY(ybottom[,ytop])
    - layer.yBoundsAtX(xleft[,xright])

    And that appears not to be what he wants anyway. Oh well.

  - Dave wants a python function to return a random text string.
    - font.randomText(script[,lang])
  - If ff opened a bad bitmap font file and tried to place it in a font's background layer, ff would crash.
  - Adjusting the Previous Control Point from the Get Info (point) window of an HVCurve point had very odd effects.
  - Ubuntu now checks that if you use "%3$s" in a sprintf format string you must also use "%1$" and "%2$".
  - Patch by Nicolas Spalinger improving OFL tooltip.
  - Patch by Andrey Panov to add GetAnchorPoints to legacy scripting.
  - Widhaya Trisarnwadhana points out that the mnemonic _N is bound to two items in the View menu of outline glyphs.
  - I let people assign any name to glyphs in the private use area without destroying the encoding. But due to a bug, if you changed the glyph's encoding to the PUA it fell into that code and would not change the font's encoding either.
  - If a point had control points which were less than 1 em-unit from it, then FF would sometimes think it was a curve point when it wasn't. That's probably still true, but some of the more egregious cases have been fixed.
  - Panov suggests that for cubic points, when we round them we should not round the locations of the controls but should round the distance from the on-curve point. Things are a bit trickier for quadratic controls. If the on-curve point is interpolated, then obviously the controls should be rounded and not the on-curve point.
  - Exporting bitmap formats chose the wrong format.

  I wish to thank Michal Nowakowski for fixing my bugs these last few months. I no longer have as much time for FontForge as I have in the past, and my attention to the project is spotty. Currently I am training to run a 50 mile race (~80K) to celebrate my 50th birthday this year. I've already run a 50K race as preparation.

- 8-Apr-2009
  - Extensive patch by Alexey Kryukov to support composites (references) in bitmap fonts.
    - Copy/Paste bitmap references
    - Output into sfnts
    - sfd extension
    - Fix them up so that bitmap formats which don't support them have them unlinked
  - Support for the JSTF table (sfd extension), new dialog `Element->Other Info->Justification`.
  - Add a set of new python functions for manipulating CID keyed fonts:
    - cidConvertTo(registry,ordering,supplement)
    - cidConvertByCmap(filename)
    - cidFlatten()
    - cidFlattenByCmap(filename)
    - cidInsertBlankSubFont()
    - cidRemoveSubFont()
  - Add support for reading/writing version 1.8 of Adobe's feature file format (while, I hope, retaining the ability to read version 1.6). Fix a number of bugs in parsing feature files.

    FontForge now supports the 'BASE' table (in feature files).

    The new format is considerably better than the old and can now be used to express almost all of OpenType.

    Changes:

    - ability to name anchors and value records and use them later.
    - contourpoints used to be expressed as "<contourpoint 2>" and are now expressed as "contourpoint 2" (no brokets). Adobe does not mention this in the changelog. [Incompatible change]
    - It is now possible to specify a GDEF mark attachment class in the lookupflags statement.
    - The syntax for mark to base/ligature/mark lookups is completely different. [Incompatible change]
    - The syntax for contextual lookups has been extended to allow them to reference lookups by name. [FontForge has always done this. When I suggested to Adobe that they follow suit they said they would not. They have now followed suit but have used an incompatible syntax to accomplish the same ends. So this is an Incompatible change for FontForge]
    - The syntax for contextual lookups has been extended to allow for the new mark lookups.
    - It is now possible to specify a reverse chaining substitution lookup.
    - It is now possible to specify descriptive names for the ss00-ss99 features. FontForge doesn't support this but will parse and ignore it
  - Last release Werner asked me to put in checks for glyphs that exceded various limits in the font (glyphs outside the bounding box, glyphs with advance widths bigger than the max, etc.) The problem is that erroneous fonts often have thousands of these errors, so only report once -- unless they turn on fontlint.
  - Fix several problems with simplifying quadratic splines.
  - Could still get control points pointing diametrically opposite their desired position when converting cubics to quadratics (happened when we could not find a good solution by subdividing the spline and had to try another approach).
  - AddExtrema could go into an infinite loop.
  - Barry points out that when converting something to a CID font through a CMAP the last glyph in the encoding will be lost.
  - Some inconsistancies in ff python docs and reality.
  - The regen bitmaps dlg sometimes did not use freetype for all glyphs.
  - Metrics view had problems with cid fonts.
  - FontForge was supposed to check that the compile time (include file) freetype library version number matched the installed version number. But it didn't. Only matters in the debugger, but is important there.
  - Autoinstructor: fixed a hang reported by Andrey V. Panov.
  - Autoinstructor: patch from Alexey:
    - More tweaking to diagonal stems.
    - Added support to horizontal ghost hints not tied to blue zones and vertical ghost hints.
  - Barry points out a free which is sometimes inappropriate.
  - The transform function from the fontview (and python) would transform images in the background layer multiple times -- once for each selected layer.
  - Autoinstructor: patch from Alexey:
    - Fix an issue reported by Andrey V. Panov (counter control again).
    - One type of dependent stems were positioned with wrong method; resulting in serifs pushed beyond their blue zones and other quirks.
  - Fix a crash bug in the math kern dlg.
  - If a tt control point were on top of an on-curve point, then ff would ignore it. So when I read things in I moved it, slightly. But that didn't work, because the instructions would do the wrong thing with it, and if it were part of an interpolated sequence that info would be garbled. So only swallow control points if they don't have a nextcpindex.
- 24-Feb-2009
  - Support for UFO version 2.
  - If a CID font contained a ".notdef" glyph, then when FF generated a Type1 CID font resource from it, FF would omit the .notdef glyph.
  - Patch from Panov to allow legacy scripting to guess values for the private dictionary. PrivateGuess(key).
  - Werner wants to know what version of freetype ff is using. So the debug window now shows this on the info line (I presume that's where it is most important).
  - Andreas Neustifter provided a FontForge icon with a transparent background (or the mac).
  - In TrueType debugging Werner originally asked to mark pixels which changed state. (So there were four states: on and still on, just recently turned on, just recently turned off, always off). Now he'd like to see exactly the current state.
  - People complain that under window managers that try to behave like MS Windows, the palettes slowly walk off the screen. This patch should (almost) fix that. A palette may start to walk off but each time it does, it will be brought back close to the zero point.
  - Pango doesn't like a utf8 string which consists solely of a variation selector. So don't draw them.
  - Werner doesn't want to see anchor points when debugging.
  - Change weight from the fontview usually crashed.
  - In the past if someone had a glyph with a negative advance width, FF would output a large postive number to the 'hmtx' table, instead output 0.
  - Yet another undo problem caused by the [Apply] button in the expand stroke dlg. This one on cancelling the dlg.
  - Werner wants to see what points the current instruction is going to move, so when debugging highlight these points. Also draw circles around the points which are used as reference points.
  - FF needed libxml to compile.
  - If there were no undoes in a glyph then Expand Stroke would crash.
  - Werner suggests adding a check that advance widths are all less than hhea.advanceWidthMax
  - Ah. Werner wants ff to tell him when an isFixedPitch font has a glyph with an andvance width which differs from advanceWidthMax.
  - Add a check that glyphs are within the font's bounding box too.
  - When creating a metrics view with many glyphs, one of which needed to be autohinted, then ff might crash.
  - Width was not set when building some small-caps glyphs out of references.
  - When I boxified Page Setup a typo meant that one radio button occurred twice and another got lost. Resulting in -- a crash.
  - Some dialogs don't get destroyed after they are finished with. Instead they hang around, invisible, containing state information that becomes relevant next time they appear. They need to be able to change their transient_for hints, since they may pop up with a new owner window.
  - Points of extrema weren't being marked correctly in the glyph view.
  - Mark to ligature anchor points not output properly to feature files.
  - Another member problem in merge fonts.
- 24-Dec-2008

  - Apple appears to have shipped a buggy version of X11 with 10.5. The problem appears fixed in 10.5.6 (It may have been fixed earlier, but I don't have a machine on which I can test that).

    The problem only affects fontforge it if uses pango or cairo.

    This release of fontforge tries to check for a buggy system, and if it thinks it is running on one, then it will refuse to use Pango and Cairo.

    The problem does not affect Mac 10.4.*

    You may upgrade from 10.5 to 10.5.6 by going to the Apple Menu and selecting the "Software Update" menu item, and then the "Mac OS X Update Combined".

    You probably need to install X11 before you upgrade the Operating System.

  - Fix more memory problems in Merge Fonts.
  - If a font were missing a .notdef glyph. If the user tried to display a font sample of text which included a character not in the font. Then (after the recent patches for grid-fit metrics in Print dlg) fontforge would crash.
  - Fix a bug in old cubic to quadratic conversion.
  - Lots of changes to extrema code.
    1. Find problems and add extrema had different defn of "short" splines (ones which could have extrema) so we'd get conflicting behavior.
    2. FontView add extrema couldn't be undone.
    3. Many improvements in the algorithm. Too worried of rounding errors before.
  - Initializing the font info dialog crashed on the mac when -O2 was specified during configure (the default situation).
  - After adding an Apply button the Transform dlg would crash if invoked in a glyph with no undoes.
- 15-Dec-2008
  - Add an X resource editor.
  - Make the metrics view be more like the display dlg in that you can specify a point-size/dpi to view stuff (also include increment/decrement pointsize). Fix Display dlg so that it passes freetype a point size/dpi combination rather than the (almost) equivalent pixelsize.
  - Patch by "JustFillBug" to exend python scripting by making the find interator become a find/replace iterator.
  - Patch by Taco to fix a memory problem reading bad baseline data.
  - Patch from Andrey PANOV to extend GlyphInfo (legacy scripting) by adding "XProfile" and "YProfile" options.
  - Add an [Apply] button to the transform and expand stroke dialogs in the outline view. (Request from Andrey).
  - Make ff parse preference files independent of the decimal point local in which they were written (that is -- accept either "." or "," in floating numbers).
  - If a Cubic layer had a notdef glyph, then sometimes, rasterizing using freetype would fail (not a freetype problem, I didn't set things up right).
  - Fix one more problems with points being snapped to a wrong stem side (it was still possible in case of off-curve points).
  - Metrics View and Display dlg weren't showing grid fit metrics properly. Several bugs.
  - FF used to shift glyphs left if "build accented" created something with a large enough negative left side bearing (ie. generally when centering a large accent over an "I"). Panov doesn't like this.
  - Change so that only modal dialogs are marked transient. Make sure everybody is marked as a dlg.
  - FF got confused by format 4 cmaps which weren't unicode.
  - Goto dlg would not test altunis when looking for a unicode code point.
  - If a langsys table had a required feature, then ff would drop one feature from the list of features. This omitted feature should have been the required one (which is marked specially), but wasn't always.
  - In my eternal vigilence against rounding errors I failed to report some intersections which were very close to the end points.
  - Change the contour direction tester so that instead of looking at the first part of the contour it sees, make it check the whole thing, so if there are self-intersections we will get inconsistent results. Change everyone who looks at the direction tester to be prepared for an error return.
  - In the glyph view, add the option to check for self-intersections before calculating whether a contour is clockwise or anti-. However, this check can be extremely slow for complex glyphs (those with lots of splines) so include an option to turn it off.
  - Add the extension ".lzma" to the list of compression styles that ff is prepared to deal with.
  - patch by Taco for sfnts with no understandable encoding.
  - Patch by Panov to add a new scritping command SelectGlyphsBoth.
  - loading of Apple gvar fonts broken.
  - Redo all the default font family names we ask for. For example "Helvetica" is provided by X11 bitmaps, but not by fontconfig. Now provide a set of names for each family grouping which will work with either font provider.
  - Back before supporting multiple layers, the transform dlg had an entry "Transform Background too", that should be changed to "Transform all layers".
  - When doing a "Scale Emsize", glyphs containing references with UseMyMetrics set were not set to the correct width if the refered glyph occured later in the encoding.
  - Change the definition of FontView.FontSize. Used to be in pixels. Make it be in points.
  - We could get into infinite recursion when CVChar and DVChar each passed non-latin characters to the other in hopes the other could handle it. Neither could. They kept calling deeper and deeper.
  - Add some more checks for badly numbered glyphs.
  - Memory problems with merge:
    - Counter masks
    - Diagonal stems
    - Mismatch layers
  - Memory bug when copying contextual chaining lookups.
  - Scrolling the GPOS/GSUB lookups panes for font info cause lots of nasty flickering.
  - The text fields in the metrics view (right, left bearings, width, kern, etc) drew black text on top of a black selection. It wasn't legible.
- 17-Nov-2008
  - Displaying magnified bitmap strikes in the font view often caused a crash.
  - Non-English translations of "%d pixel bitmap" in the View menu of the font view came out garbled. There were interpreted as latin1 rather than utf8
- 15-Nov-2008
  - FontForge will now use libpango and libcairo if these libraries are present. Pango provides support for drawing opentype text in any language, so it should now be possible to provide po files for the Arabic and Indic languages. Pango also draws anti-aliased text so the user interface should look nicer.

    Cairo will draw anti-aliased lines and splines (and text as well). Cairo also supports translucent colors.

    If you have an old release of pango then it may not be able to draw on top of cairo, in which case you won't see complex scripts drawn properly in the outline glyph view (the only view in which cairo is active).

    Start up is slower with either Pango or Cairo active because both use fontconfig to initialize stuff and that can take time.

    Cairo, and to a lesser extent, Pango can slow down drawing. Especially if you use X across a wire (on a display not connected to your computer). The slowdown depends to some extent on your video card, driver, X release, etc. If you find these libraries too slow to be useable you may turn either off in Preferences. (You may also turn them off at configure time).

    The first time fontforge starts with pango (I think it's pango) enabled, initialization is very slow -- several minutes -- do not be alarmed, it only happens once.

    Pango crashes on my cygwin system, so my cygwin build does not ship with either pango or cairo.

    The version of cairo available from fink on the mac (1.0) is too old for it to work with fontforge (which needs at least 1.2). So the mac builds do not ship with cairo.

    The default initialization of fontconfig on the mac doesn't seem to find any fonts. You should create a ~/.fonts directory and drop into it the fonts you want to be displayed.

  - Updated Polish, Greek and Russian translations.

    Created a teeny tiny translation file for Malayalam.

  - Change the image import dlg to display jpegs by default.
  - Show gridfit omitted a round to int when displaying grid fit outlines. If you use 72dpi, then all was fine, otherwise there would be a slight difference between where the outline was and where it should have been.
  - Remove the preference item to specify a pixmap directory. Instead allow the user to specify a pixmap search path with X resources. `Gdraw.GGadgets.ImagePath`
  - Many new X resources:
    - GComboBox.Box...
    - GComboBoxMenu.Box...
    - GNumericField.Box...
    - GNumericFieldSpinner.Box...
    - fontforge.View.Background.
    - ...Box.GradientBG
    - ...Box.GradientStartCol
  - All dialogs should now be marked as transient for tiling window managers (I'm told). But a few dialogs weren't even marked as dialogs.
  - Boxify the Print Setup dialog.
  - Doing a print sample of a truetype font produced bad CID output.
  - Widths of dependent glyphs where not changed by changing the rbearing of a glyph in the metrics view.
  - Force a reflow of the TeX box when the user changes from TeX Text to TeX Math. The labels change, and in polish the label gets so long it hides under the text field.
  - Boxify the TeX More Params dialog of fontinfo.
  - When a point was exactly midway between its control points, FontForge would not detect that it was a curve point after recent work. As this happens frequently in TrueType (all interpolated points) we shouldn't do that.
  - Fix some more cases where the "link" buttons in the FontInfo->UnicodeRanges and Generate Fonts dlgs looked wrong.
  - FontForge has been generating bad bounding box information for BDF fonts.
  - Adobe doesn't define how big a spline must be for the "no extrema" restriction to apply. Phillip Poll suggests that fontforge have a command that defines this on a per-font basis. Element->Validation->Set Extremum Bound.
  - More accurate catagorization of whether a point is curve or tangent.
  - Sequence/Lookup dlg of contextual lookup dlgs can be too small.
  - Michal points out some strings which are not translated.
  - Michal points out that the [Default using suffix] button in the single substitution subtable dialog didn't work if the lookup were bound to no features.
  - Add a lock icon beside a reference name if that reference has "use-my-metrics" set.
  - If a quadratic glyph is put into spiro mode, modified, and then put back into bezier mode then it LOOKS as if it is still quadratic (there are interpolated points shown) but it is actually cubic.
  - If someone changed the button shape to round rect, then the link button in Font Info->Unicode Ranges became a blot.
  - Alexey suggests using typo-line-gap between lines in the print dialog.
  - Alexey also provides a patch to fix the old church slavonic sample text in the print dialog and a couple of other issues.
  - Patch by Kanou. SetPanose in legacy scripting did not set the panose_set bit so all changes were lost.
  - Added duplicate name and duplicate unicode to the things validate checks for.
  - Add a command to set the color of all selected glyphs.
  - Give instructions in Find Problems on how to figure out which two glyphs have the same name, or the same unicode code point.
  - Pango has caniptions if I ask it to draw one of the code points reserved for surrogates or some of the "NOT A UNICODE CHARACTER" codepoints (0xffff, etc.). So don't draw these, and mark them as unusable slots instead.
  - Redo the selection menu in the font view.
    - If the user holds down the shift key then the selection is enlarged by any glyphs specified in the command. (logical or)
    - If the user holds down the control key then any glyphs specified by the command are removed from the selection.
    - If the user has both shift and control down then only glyphs currently selected and specified by the command will remain selected (logical and)
    - Otherwise the selection is set to what is specifed by the command.

    Add new commands to select glyphs which

    - Contain nothing by references
    - Contain nothing by splines
    - Contain both splines and references (bad idea)
    - Are whitespace (and contain neither splines nor references).
  - The print dialog had a nasty habit of crashing when asked to undo.
  - Off by one error with scrollbar would sometimes hide the last line in the print dialog.
  - Lines of text in the Insert Text Outlines dialog were drawn in the reverse order from that shown in the dialog (ie. top line on the bottom).
  - Fix a crash bug in the print dialog.
  - It used to be that if a glyph had instructions, and the background was order2, then editing the background (or any order2 background layer) would clear the instructions.
  - Peter Baker says:

    > In both "Show Grid Fit" and the TT debugger it used to be possible to turn off the display of outlines in the foreground layer simply by unchecking "fore". Now it can no longer be done, and as a result it's become more difficult to check at a glance the overall effect of TT instructions. It would be nice to have this capability back.

  - HV points don't work well with quadratic splines. Too many cases where they just specify an impossiblility. Attempt to improve on that. Merge on quadratic splines also left much to be desired.
  - When FF starts browsing the OFLib it creates a thread which requests the new state of OFLib (ie. any fonts since last time I looked?). This thread should die after it has read all the new stuff. It did die, but then someone restarted it and the whole process repeated. Which might be ok -- we'd get a new state whenever the site changed -- except that it meant a flicker of the display every minute or so.
  - Nicolas Spalinger points out that a license search in the oflib dialog (of fontforge) finds exactly the opposite of what was asked for (searching for PD finds OFL and vice versa).
  - There exist sfds where the width of a glyph does not match that specified by use my metrics on references. So when we read these guys in, fix up the erroneous widths and complain.
  - Distributions no longer provide .so files -- unless you ask for -dev packages, and sometimes those don't exist. This means that dlopening a library doesn't work. I think that's really stupid on the distibutioner's part. What do they gain by removing the .so file? But I won't even try to change their minds. Instead try to open the appropriate foo.so.? file if we can't find foo.so (Not always, but in the more important cases).
  - When deleting a mark-to-mark anchor class, then any mark glyph which had both a base mark anchor point and a normal mark anchor point would have only one of them deleted. The other would be a sort of ghost point pointing to an anchor class that didn't exist and causing problems.
  - Jason Pagura points out that while the short cuts in menus may be changed by the user, the short cuts which appear in windows without menus may not be. So Cut/Copy/Paste in textfields always use Cntl-X/C/V rather than Cmd-X/C/V. Fix this.
  - Add a resource to let the user set the background color of selected glyphs in the fontview. Then Alexey wanted a way to set the foreground color of selected glyphs.
  - Points could be snapped to a wrong edge of a non-ghost stem controlling a blue zone.
  - Put in code to complain when a font contains a hint mask with bits set indicative of hints which have not been defined.
  - When generating random text for a font in the print dlg, FF would alocate one character to few and trample memory.
  - Prefs file was treating hvoffset as a float rather than an int.
  - Patch by Michal to allow user control over whether points are snapped to pixels in charview, or whether we get sub-pixel positioning (and fuzzy lines).
  - Markers for lines/curves which are almost, but not quite, horizontal or vertical.
  - The french translation of the Unicode Names List database changed encodings from latin1 to utf8 when they came out with version 5.0, and I didn't notice.
  - Alexej provides some new preferences for truetype hinting:
    - InstructDiagonalStems -- Generate instructions for diagonal stem hints
    - InstructSerifs -- Try to detect serifs and other elements protruding from base stems and generate instructions for them.
    - InstructBallTerminals -- Generate instructions for ball terminals
    - InterpolateStrongPoints-- Interpolate between stem edges some important points, not affected by other instructions.
    - CounterControl -- Make sure similar or equal counters remain the same in gridfitted outlines. Enabling this option may result in glyph advance widths being inconsistently scaled at some PPEMs
  - Many problems when numbering points in glyphs with references.
  - Back in Feb, Werner gave me clear instructions on how to handle fonts where bit one of 'head'.flags was unset. I did something I thought was equivalent, but which wasn't. The result broke some glyphs in the "Vista fonts". Let's try doing what he said to do instead.
  - Autoinstructor: some fixes to strong point optimizer.
  - Old bug still exists for monospaced fonts. Glyphs were positioned at 65,000+ rather than with a negative left side bearing.
  - Autoinstructor: some points didn't really need to be touched by 'strong point' interpolation.
  - Be a little more careful about TeX pk and gf files in the openfont dlg. Alexej points out that .*gf also matches .xgf.
  - It used to be that when we changed glyphs in a charview we would turn off gridfit. Now it will simply refigure gridfit info for the new glyph.
  - Make it so that moving a point around will not turn off grid fit.
  - Andy Balholm points out that Help->Help often fails on the mac because DYLD_LIBARY_PATH points to /sw/lib which often contains libjpeg.so which conflicts with apple's libjpeg.so which means oascript doesn't work to invoke things. Undefine it before trying to open the help file.
  - make acorn2sfd work again.
  - When an svg font specified kerning with more than one glyph name in glyph1 or 2 then ff would create a kerning by class thing ... except it didn't do any of the checking needed to insure that we were given a valid set of glyph classes, and so generally produced garbage. Just make lots of kern pairs.
  - When processing svg arc commands (in a path) we could get rounding errors that lead to NANs. Clip the range so that doesn't happen.
  - Add font.importBitmaps to python scripting.
  - the cli argument "--library-status" was broken.
  - A couple of important textfields were not using an input context and were limited to ASCII (probably) when they should not have been. Font Comment, lookup name, etc.
- 27-Sept-2008
  - Implement a concept of "master counters" (similar to PS counter hints, but more flexibe). I. e. if there are two or more equal or similar counters in the glyph, then references pointing to stems forming the first counter are added to stems forming the subsequent counters. This can be used to implement a sort of counter control in the autoinstructor.

    Adjust the width to length ratio used to determine if a diagonal stem is acceptable.

  - There appears to be (what I consider to be) a bug in scim. If the Mod2Mask bit is set in the event then it returns a keysym of 0. Other input managers do not do this. And some input managers depend on having that bit set (it is used on the Mac for Option processing for example). The upshot is that if I want to do mnemonics (Alt/Meta key sets Mod2Mask) I must clear this bit when passing info to scim. Since I don't know what input manager is attached I must clear the bit for all managers. Which breaks some of them.
  - When doing completion in a textfield, if ff completed the entire string, then it would not select the unexpected stuff. The result would be that I would type "a", then "." and ff would complete to "a.sc" (rather than "a.sc") so when I typed the "s" I would get "a.scs" rather than "a.sc".
  - Add code to allow users to customize the font used in various dialogs and windows which previously could not be customized.
  - Multiple Master dlg was very broken.
  - Saving and Reading quadradic splines to the 'PfEd'.'layr' subtable didn't work.

    Also if we didn't save the background layer (layer=0) then a random layer would (inappropriately) become the background.

    Extend the 'layr' format to store a background/foreground flag per layer.

  - Still problems in importing lookups on 64bit machines.
  - A thread on typophile exposes my ignorance. The x-height of an italic font is usually a little less than that of it's companion roman font. (This is to correct for an optical illusion, because vertical stems are slanted in italic they will be longer than the corresponding stem in an upright font, and to the human eye they will look taller (even though they are not)). So add an option to the Italic dialog to make the x-height a little smaller.
  - Change the menu handler so it can draw mac menu icons (cloverleaf for command, up arrow for shift, ^ for control and weird squiggly for option).

    Remove the hack that if the modifier mask for the command key was set then we'd also set the control mask (this meant that the command key would work as control, but it meant it could only work as control).

    Let the command key work as itself, and put in special code to check whether X11 is going to give us the command key (or will that key be used in the X11's own menubar). If we get command then we load a special set of keymap bindings (which, presumably, will use command). If we don't find a special set of keymaps, then fall back on normal processing.

  - Make the pixelsize in anchor control be saved in prefs file (clean up prefs file for scripting, bring up to date).
  - We didn't have any way to remove an sfnt table (like 'fpgm') even though we tell the user to do exactly that in the auto instructor.
  - Was not allocating enough memory for comments in the cvt table structure when user did a [Change Length].
  - Patch by Thomas ?. When FF loaded a ufo font (actually any glyf file) it used integers for the coordinates instead of reals.
  - We used to move left and right point coordinates to the baseline for italic stems, so that they may well fall outside of the glyph bounding box. So prevent the situation where this could lead to a nan in spline creation. Also don't change the slope of italic stems when resizing a glyph.
  - Clear should only clear anchors, hints and tt instructions if it is the last foreground layer. We could get picky and clear hints when the last cubic foreground layer went, and instructions whent he last quadratic layer went, but I don't think it is worth the bother.
  - If we have a 'TYP1' sfnt with a kern table which kerns a glyph with no unicode encoding, then FF would likely crash.
  - Oops. Typo in Generic change function. Crashed when doing change glyph on a glyph with only references
  - Just as the paste command should only set the width in foreground layers if all other foreground layers are empty, so the clear command should only reset the width in similar conditions.
  - Internal conversion from fontforge splinesets to ff python contours would often leave interpolated points showing in the contour.
  - When FF generated a default name for a lookup when adding a new lookup from font info, that lookup index was always set to 0, which meant multiple lookups for the same feature would stand a good chance of getting the same default name. Do a little better.
  - Extend the small caps dlg to create petite caps if desired.
  - Fix an uninitialized variable in GXDrawGrabSelection.
  - FF would attach a mark to the first anchor point in the correct subtable in the base glyph. It would not check for the correct anchor class.
  - Python contour conversions would often introduce a control point on a linear order2 spline.
  - List of Panose letterforms was missing an entry from the middle so all later entries were off by one.
  - "Fore" and "Back" weren't localized in one significant place.
  - Add a few more checks (when reading in) on the validity of the 'MATH' table.
  - FF would generate a bad MATH table if given a glyph with assembly data but no variant sizes.
  - Dropping a drag and drop into the metricsview after the last character tried to insert the drop before the first character.

    Clean up drag and drop from the font view a bit.

  - I have been trying to attach marks to bases backwards. It is the mark which moves, so the attachment should happen when we get to the mark, and we should look backwards to find the base. I have been finding the base, and then walking forward to find the mark.

    My approach failed if the lookup contains multiple subtables and a base glyph has two marks being attached, one from each subtable -- I would attach the mark in the first subtable, but then having found a subtable that worked would stop, and the second mark never got attached.

  - When dragging and dropping lookups, allow dropping a lookup subtable into a different lookup of the same font (assuming it's got the right lookup type).
  - The recent patch to insure that [Imported] lookups from one font to another came across in the right order didn't work if there were nested lookups involved. The order of nested lookups is irrelevant -- unless they are also used in a non-nested context.
  - Add the ability to define a "Group" by glyph color.
- 28-August-2008
  - The Layers pane of Font Info randomly wrote memory when it was initialize. This could cause crashes, and who knows what weird behavior.
  - Validate spent half its time validating the foreground layer and half validating the current layer. This could cause crashes if the current layer was not the foreground.
  - Fixed a bug in parsing old style CID files. (those with type1 charstrings)
  - FontForge's OpenType layout engine probably didn't do the right thing in anchor positioning of mark-to-base lookups when the base glyph had been moved by a previous GPOS lookup.
  - Still missing some unicode ranges from 5.1.
- 25-August-2008
  - Turn off debugging if the user switches layers.
  - The truetype debugger really wanted to debug the foreground layer and not any other.
  - When validating a font, and double clicking to bring up find problems in a charview, then the layer setting of find problems was (usually) incorrect.
  - Add a command font.correctReferences() to python scripting to fixup cases of mixed outlines and references (outlines get moved into a newly created glyph and then a reference will be made to it). Also fix cases where the transformation matrix can't be expressed in truetype (scaling by 2 or more, for example).
  - Barry points out a typo introduced in the background layers patch which would cause crashes in fonts with many layers.
  - Minor improvements and bugfixes in resolving stem conflicts. Also, lists of HV stems are now built in stemdb.c, so rely on these data instead of doing a double work in autohint.c.

Earlier Changes
Changes to PfaEdit (predecessor to FontForge)
Changes to the sfd format.