Hack hints are being removed in Nerd Fonts patched versions, here's the fix

[chrissimpkins]

Great project Ryan. Thanks for including Hack with your patched releases.

It looks like your patching approach is removing the hints from the Hack ttf variants. This could lead to issues for some Linux distros and all Windows users. They are simple to restore if you would like to modify your releases (or for anyone who wants to do this on their own).

Use the following approach prior to the font installs:

• Install ttfautohint
• Grab our autohint.sh script and ttfautohint Control Instructions Files (Hack-*-TA.txt) from this directory of the Hack repository https://github.com/chrissimpkins/Hack/blob/master/postbuild_processing/tt-hinting
• Modify the infile and outfile paths in the autohint.sh shell script based upon the Nerd Fonts release file names (and outfile path of your choice)
• chmod +x autohint.sh
• Execute ./autohint.sh to restore the hints.

These hints may/likely will change with new Hack releases so it is necessary to use Control Instruction Files that are part of the same Hack release that you patch.

[ryanoasis]

@chrissimpkins Awesome thanks! Thanks for the compliments 😊 . I love Hack 😉

Your support means a lot, I will try to get this fixed when I can (might not be next 'release' because I have already pushed to much into it 😆) but at the very least your instructions are provided for help 👍

[chrissimpkins]

👍

[dingmaotu]

@ryanoasis Hi, the Hack font patch is awesome but it is unusable on Windows because the hinting (in 'post' table where isFixedPitch is set to 1) is removed. In gVim and mintty, only Monospace font is allowed. Without the hinting Windows does not recognize the font as Monospace.

I know little about font design and fontforge scripting, so I can not help with the code. I can only manually edit the isFixedPitch and regenerate the font you provided. This is very frustrating since I downloaded the "Windows Compatible" font... I spent almost one day to dig the Internet and the True Type font specification to locate the problem (though it is a great learning experience, haha). I wanted to submit an issue and I found this.

Please fix this issue and thank you 😊

[chrissimpkins]

@dingmaotu

This script will update any font isFixedPitch post table setting to a value of 1. It will work for any of the fonts included in Ryan's collection.

Add the following script on the path fpfix.py and execute with:

$ python fpfix.py [path to font file]

Dependencies:

1. Python install
2. fonttools library (Python) install (pip install fonttools)

Gist link

https://gist.github.com/chrissimpkins/d0898e9580b9aa8f2ae692afe724bf93

fpfix.py Script

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

### DEPENDENCY:
#     fontTools Python library
#       ==> https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools
#       ==> Install: pip install fonttools

### USAGE:
#     python fpfix.py [filepath to font]

import sys
from fontTools import ttLib

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    sys.stderr.write("[fpfix.py] ERROR: Please enter a path to the font file")
    sys.exit(1)

try:
    tt = ttLib.TTFont(sys.argv[1])
    post = tt["post"]__dict___
    post["isFixedPitch"] = 1
    tt.save(outfile)
    print("[fpfix.py]: '" + sys.argv[1] + "' fixed pitch setting was changed to 1 in the post table")
except Exception as e:
    sys.stderr.write("[fpfix.py] : ERROR: Unable to update the font isFixedPitch setting. " + str(e))
    sys.exit(1)

[ryanoasis]

Been busy on 0.9.0 so still haven't gotten around to this

---

@dingmaotu Thanks for the info. Sorry for your troubles. Yeah I was just going to say to try the instructions @chrissimpkins has provided

@chrissimpkins thanks again for the details on the fix. I should probably add some process post patching to avoid having these missing hints

---

Edit: Actually this doesn't seem overly difficult. I'll try to resolve this in 0.9.0 with some variation on what @chrissimpkins provided 😄

[chrissimpkins]

👍 let me know if there is anything I can do

[dingmaotu]

@chrissimpkins Thanks for the script. Actually I used the fonttools provided ttx command to fix individual fonts. Having a script is a lot better

[chrissimpkins]

@dingmaotu great! You can modify it to process multiple fonts at one go. Enjoy!

@ryanoasis Ryan let me know if there are any open type issues that need work. Happy to pitch in to help fix these.

[ryanoasis]

@chrissimpkins Thanks appreciate it. I can't think of anything specific off the top of my head but if I do I'll let you know. Also of course if you see anything you can/want to fix or improve that would be great.

A lot of the open issues should be fixed soon (with 0.9.0) so the picture of what is actually still open should clear up drastically