[XeTeX] corrupted Tibetan font

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> When I tried to install it through FontBook on OS X, I got a  
> warning : this font is corrupted, do not use it.

  It happens. I experienced it with Code2000 as well.

> I attach the report  issued by FontBook in case it may help (sorry, it
> is in French).

  (To the list) It basically says that the loca, cmap and hmtx tables
are corrupted; “if you use this font, several problems may occurr,
including the application freezing”, etc ...

> So my questions are: is it really risky to try and use such a font?  

  No. It's simply a buggy font. Even Apple ships buggy fonts with minor
problems (see Euphemia in Tiger, for Canadian Syllabics; there is a
naming issue which makes the regular face impossible to use in most
applications; and yudit crashes on that font, too).

  All the horrible warnings you get are more of a disclaimer on Apple's
behalf than anything else. Of course it's *possible* to have genuine
problems with a buggy font, like incorrect pointers being dereferenced
in the loca table, causing segmentation faults, but I deem most
libraries are quite well protected against that. It's not likely that
you'll encounter anything worse than incorrect displays (which are
indeed a risk, I daresay).

  That said it would be better to have it fixed (after all it's distributed by
the IT Department of the Government of Bhutan to write their national
language; it's just not serious to have errors ;-); first of all, the
file name is Joyig, but the font name is actually Wangdi29 which is
rather silly.

> has anybody else used it and what happened? Thanks in advance.

  I've just tried it and nothing bad happened. The output looks
reasonable. The character codes for the Arabic numbers are mapped
to the Tibetan numbers, which is of course wrong, but mostly harmless.

	Arthur
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