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fonttools / fontbakery

🧁 A font quality assurance tool for everyone
https://fontbakery.readthedocs.io
Apache License 2.0
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[com.google.fonts/check/name/family_and_style_max_length] Check for PS name too strict? #4725

Open jenskutilek opened 1 month ago

jenskutilek commented 1 month ago

Observed behaviour

Name ID 6 'XxxxxxxXxxx-ExtraLightItalic' exceeds 27 characters. This has been found to cause problems with PostScript printers, especially on Mac platforms.

Does failing this check (a WARN) have any real-world impact?

I guess it aims at uniqueness of PostScript font names inside the first 27 characters, but it doesn't explicitly say so.

It seems that particularly Adobe's PDF export will add random characters at the beginning of the font name stored in the PDF to make the names unique. I tried to see what happens if the names are not unique inside the first 27 characters, and I had to resort to manually hacking PS files in a text editor to provoke such naming collisions.

The check is not a FAIL, but a WARN, but its effect seems very improbable to occur in practice.

Expected behaviour

If the check should stay a WARN, maybe the wording can be improved to indicate that it is not about length, but uniqueness, if it actually is so.

jenskutilek commented 1 month ago

Related to 2179, which is not about ID6 though

davelab6 commented 3 weeks ago

I agree, please propose better wording :)

davelab6 commented 1 week ago

@vv-monsalve is working on a comprehensive plan to address this. I think its time to leave pre-VF systems support and make the fonts make sense for VF systems, across name IDs 1, 4, 6, etc.