Re: GSoC 2020: make hangs when making fonts

[Owen Lamb]

Hi Jean,

If Fontforge is too old, it never told me so. It generated font files
perfectly well over the last month. Running sudo apt update didn't show any
newer versions.

I can't help but notice that CI failed to build some commits on Friday due
to font issues, the same day that my issue first showed itself. It might be
possible that some update made a dependency conk out on particular setups,
including LilyDev. How that would happen is beyond me, though.

As a side note, when I was first learning MetaFont, I made the letter-beta
glyph described in the tutprial to test everything out. The .mf file has
been sitting in my VM's home directory since then. This week, when I opened
Fontforge to make sure it worked properly, I absent-mindedly clicked on
letter-beta.mf when it requested to open a file. To my surprise, Fontforge
actually opened it up and showed it as a glyph. However, it looks
wonky--not at all how I remember it looking when I first made the file.
Attached is the source file and a screenshot of Fontforge's interpretation
of the glyph. Not sure if it'll lead anywhere, but you never know...

I'd like to see if my issue is reproducible on a fresh LilyDev VM hosted
elsewhere. (In particular, my host machine's Windows 10, but I'm not sure
that should matter.) Any volunteers willing to try that?

Thanks for being patient with me,
Owen

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:34 AM Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:

> Hi Owen,
>
> To begin with, glad to meet you!
>
> What an annoying problem. Here's what I could suggest:
>
> - Try 'git -xdf' to clean your repository entirely, removing any
> untracked or ignored files. If you're touching fonts, it may be that
> some build artifacts have to be removed (likewise, people often need
> such a procedure or a 'make doc-clean' for 'make doc' to succeed after
> changes in the documentation build system). Beware if you have important
> files (a dry run is advised, using -xdfn).
>
> - I'm puzzled on what to think of
>
> > Making mf/out/feta11.pfb < mf
> > Copyright (c) 2000-2014 by George Williams. See AUTHORS for Contributors.
> >   License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <
> http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
> >   with many parts BSD <http://fontforge.org/license.html>. Please read
> LICENSE.
> >   Based on sources from 20170812-ML-D.
> >   Based on source from git with hash:
>
> On my system (Ubuntu 20.04), the last two lines read
>
>   Version: 20190801
>   Based on sources from 03:10 UTC  6-Mar-2020-ML-D-GDK3.
>
> Perhaps your Fontforge is too old?
>
> Hope that helps!
> Jean
>

beta.mf
Description: Binary data

Fontforge beta.png
Description: PNG image