Typophile

Compile and output issues for MM OT design (apparently I broke something)

Stickley

New to Typophile (thanks to Tiffany [here] and John [at ILT]) - former lurker, old to Fontographer, new to Fontlab (stuck on 4.6 for the time being), old to type design, new to Multiple Master design, old at breaking things and creating strange problems for myself...

Well, I've been plugging away at my design for a few months now and have nice, full set of glyphs I'm pleased with - diacritics, alternates, ligatures, and so forth. I (naively) started replacing charatcers in an existing font whose character set I liked, made my own kerning classes (rights and lefts), defined a few other classes, set kerning nicely for my base set of U & lc and Small Caps, got my alternates and old style refined - and I've somehow broken it so completely I have no idea what I did.

Compiling in the OT panel (or at output) results in a delightfully vague response:

"aborting because of errors"

Hurray...

For a while it would complain certain kerning classes were missing when they're in my list, so I made it worse and now I'm just bewildered. The Fontlab manual seems to think I already know what I'm doing, so I've run out of self-generated options.

Help?

Thanks.

Nick Shinn

I'm not one to recommend upgrades willy-nilly.
But I would seriously recommend you upgrade to Flab 5.
I don't recall exactly what changed, but kerning was one area where I noticed huge improvement.

Stickley

I've upgraded to FL 5, reworked a few things, completely removed all OT features and kerning info, and now get the following:

[FATAL] aborting because of errors:
syntax error at "-"
[/Users/.../Library/Application Support/FontLab/Studio 5/Features/fontlab.fea 79]

Any ideas? I see others have had similar problems but I'm stuck again. Same error occurs with my OT features in place as without.

Thanks,

Michael

Jackson

Try rebuilding your font, copy/paste your glyphs into a new file. Then import kerning, then OT.

paragraph

Happened to me when I had glyphs in classes under wrong names. Try with the check (yin-yang button) in Kerning Assistance

Stickley

Jackson seems to have the best advice on this (and to Paragraph - I had two duplicate glyphs, thanks for that too). I've placed all characters in to a new, blank document and rebuilt/imported features and kerning from there and things are working correctly so far. Needed a good clean start apparently.

A note to another vague error (see: http://typophile.com/node/33743?destination=node%2F33743) I got a balk on output with no OT compile errors, turns out the file needed font name and info or it'd choke at 91% output every time.

Thanks again,

Michael

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