Re: fondu fails on newer OS X versions

[Andrew Bernard]

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 Now, since this is outdated, older font files that 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