Typophile

FontLab Studio disaster -Help!

Stephen Rapp

I've been working on a script font with tons of contextual code including calt and clig features as well as several SS features. It has CE language support so I finally decided to do the class based kerning for all of that. I had the classes widows only showing kern classes while I was working to make it easier to handle. In order to preview my kerning in the OT preview I selected generate kern feature. When I compiled it said "fatal error" and listed the first instance of a OT class. I went back to the classes panel to find out FL had deleted all my OT classes.
Is there a way to recover my OT classes? Did this happen from selecting the kern classes at the bottom of the panel (on Mac version) or is this some particular bug in the system?

Any help greatly appreciated.
Stephen

I had the classes widows only showing kern classes while I was working to make it easier to handle.

This is a known bug.
It was metioned in a previous Build thread.
Always have "all classes" selected.
Can you rebuild from a font?

Thanks Nick,
I've added so many glyphs its probably just as well to redo the classes. I went through the feature code and made a list of my OT classes by name. Since I didn't have fractions and such, I only needed 6 OT classes, so I think if I have a bit of patience I can reconstruct them reasonably quick. I will make note of that bug.

A similar thing happened to me last winter. I was lucky to have recently upgraded to Leopard and was able to use Time Machine to retrieve an earlier version of the FontLab file before the feature code was deleted by the bug.

Here's a thread where the bug is discussed:

http://typophile.com/node/41744

Thanks for the link Mark.

I've gone through my classes listed in calt and clig and added them back in manually. Recompiled and all is good again. I will remember not to mess with that again. In my case it was hitting generate kern feature while only kern was showing that caused the drop of OT features.

Lesson learned.

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