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Re: fondu fails on newer OS X versions
From: |
Andrew Bernard |
Subject: |
Re: fondu fails on newer OS X versions |
Date: |
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 22:29:36 +1000 |
User-agent: |
Microsoft-MacOutlook/0.0.0.160212 |
Hi Mats,
This may be a half baked answer, since it is a long time since I ever did any
Mac programming. But here are some thoughts. The designers of the file system
for Apple invented the idea of a data fork and a resource fork to store
everything that they deemed to be not ‘data’, that is, icons and file types and
so on. This turned out to be a Terrible Idea (TM), partly because it is just
not portable or interoperable. Thankfully Apple have now abandoned that, as of
some time ago.
Fonts in particular were stored in the resource fork. (As to why, only those
programmers can answer). Now, since this is outdated, older font files that
lived in the resource fork were converted to use the data fork instead, as per
a normal file. These are the so called dfonts. The good old good fonts like
Times and Monaco are dfont format, even today on 10.11.4. But there are only
these in my system fonts directory:
Courier.dfont
Geneva.dfont
Helvetica.dfont
HelveticaNeue.dfont
Monaco.dfont
Times.dfont
The fondu tool was written for mac font conversion, and can convert mac font
formats to something more universal. But fondu is clearly unmaintained, and the
reason must be that it is no longer required, since the resource fork issue has
gone away.
The author of fondu is also the creator of fontforge. This is very actively
maintained. While I have not tried that yet, I am fairly confident fontforge
can do for lilypond what fondu is doing. Using fontforge for conversion of
older fonts would be a more sustainable solution that forking fondu, which is
essentialy obsolete. The fontforge program is scriptable, so I am sure it can
be made to work.
So I would suggest we take a look at replacing the functionality of fondu for
the mac lilypond distribution with a tool like fontforge. I will try to so some
experiments.
Andrew