Current changes
Changes to PfaEdit (predecessor to FontForge)

- 31-Dec-2004
  - Ah, windows pfm files expect the metrics to be output in win latin encoding order, not in the encoding defined by the pfb file. (Actually there are other posibilities for encoding, but as none is documented, I must ignore them).
  - ReplaceWithReference broke at some point
  - Add an argument-pair to the ReplaceWithReference() scripting command to allow the user to specify the amount of error that will be accepted.
  - When generating a Type1 font, if a glyph had a single reference to a glyph not in adobe encoding, and that glyph itself had a single reference (in adobe enc) and some splines, then ff would make a reference to the ref in adobe enc and ignore the splines.
  - Upgrade to Adobe-Japan1-6
  - Various fixes to svg output
    - export glyph to svg didn't work
    - multilayered generation had problems
  - Ghost hints could get outside a glyphs bounding box in a type2 font.
  - The generated truetype unique id string had an off by one error in the month
  - Add support for dashed lines in multilayered mode
  - In Full Page Glyph printing, the glyph was offset slightly from where it should have been.
  - Pasting a reference into a multi-layered font produced a very odd layer
  - ff didn't update the metrics view if the user pasted the selection with the middle mouse button.
  - if a character were not in the current encoding then ff would not display it in the metrics view (even if it were in the font)
  - Make the behavior of control points at the ends of open paths more reasonable.
  - The Point->Curve command did not adust control points correctly.
  - The View->Display Substitutions had numerous problems.
  - Fix several problems from unicode unification of accents. Many characters which are said to be based on cedilla actually use a comma, other characters said to be carons also use comma. Make the n-with-apostrophe character be treated as an accented letter.
  - Werner points out that straight lines should generally not be simplified (as they will no longer be straight afterwards). Add this knowledge to the simplify command.
- 18-Dec-2004
  - Added a raster debugger wndow
  - Each time debugger starts, remember what debug windows were open last time it was used.
  - Constraining the pen tool did not do what I expected
  - If a glyph was encoded twice (or more) in a font, and an opentype font (or perhaps a bitmap only sfnt) were generated, then any glyphs after the second encoding would have the wrong width (ie. there would be an extra entry in the horizontal metrics table corresponding to a (non-existant) copy of the doubly encoded glyph)
  - If a type1 font never defined .notdef but used it at least twice it the Encoding vector, then ff would crash.
  - Updated Japanese UI (by KANOU)
  - Werner found some crashes related to calling isalnum (etc.) using an index outside of bmp.
  - More changes (I hope improvements) to remove overlap
- 13-Dec-2004
  - Some fixes to the raster display of the debug window
  - Conversion of cubic to quadratic had a rounding error introduced by -O2. Made it a bit more forgiving about rounding errors.
  - Added two new buttons to the point info dialog to allow the user to walk around the current contour (Normally the Next button skips to the start of the next contour if you are at the end of the current one, the "Next On Contour" button returns to the first point on the contour)
  - improve interpretation of some type3 fonts (including those produced by fontographer 4)
  - patch by Yoshki Hayashi to fix mnemonic crash in layers palette
  - Added a rand() scripting command
  - Support backslash newline to break up lines in a scrpt
  - The internal adobe standard encoding thought it was unicode causing strange effects
  - Type3 fonts that set colour/grey didn't work
  - Printing at 140pt tried printing 4 glyphs across although there was only room for 3
  - At install tell pkg-config the verson of fontforge
- 3-Dec-2004
  - If a cff file contained unencoded glyphs then ff would crash when loading it.
  - When converting from cubic to quadratic splines, ff would sometimes produce a line when it should have found a spline
  - During debugging of a ttf glyph, show what rasterization would produce if the current splines were used (highlight pixels which change)
  - The debugger windows didn't always say "<empty>" when they should have.
  - The debugger would often crash the second time we closed its window
  - Asking for the script (as latin, greek, cyrillic...) of ".notdef" caused us to look at unallocated memory.
  - We weren't labelling control points in the debugger
  - debugger and grid fitter for tt fonts showed curved splines as lines
  - Kerning pairs did not get scaled when changing em-size
  - Add a preference for turning off automatic gotos as the user types in the glyph window
  - Add a command to the glyph window to toggle between the two most recent glyphs used in that window (a mini history)
  - Improved the points debugger window to show
    - implied points
    - whether a point is on or off the curve (normal or control)
    - added a scroll bar
  - Provide info on debugging points as mouse moves over them.
  - Fix (an innocuous) reference to unallocated memory
  - Added ability to insert an uninterpreted table into an SFNT
    - New preference item: PreserveTables which lists a comma seperated set of table tags which are to be loaded from SFNT files without interpretation (Note if ff thinks it understands a table it will parse it rather than preserving it)
    - Scripting command LoadTableFromFile("tag ","filename")
    - Scripting command SaveTableToFile("tag ","filename")
    - Scripting command RemovePreservedTable("tag ")
    - Scripting command HasPreservedTable("tag ")
- 22-Nov-2004
  - Kevin Schoedel suggests a new scripting command DrawsSomething()
  - Kevin Schoedel requests that PrintFont be able to print a string sample (as opposed to a sample file)
  - Kevin Schoedel points out that type1 fonts stuffed into mac resource forks are to be read in resource order rather than file order (often the two are the same) and provides a patch to fix this.
  - Change the way the default language/locale is picked in fontinfo->TTF Names
  - Remember (across invocations) whether palettes should be hidden or not.
  - Ignore NUL chars when reading PostScript strings (PS supports NULs in strings, I'm not going to bother, but I don't want to parse incorrectly because of them).
  - ff lost the ability to Select("U+xxxx") or Select("=") from a script.
  - Oops, the routine to read PostScript FontNames from a ttf file was broken by the encoding change.
  - If a ttf file contained an erroneous composite glyph with flags indicating more components after the glyph had run out of data, then ff might attempt to read instructions also and have problems.
  - If a font contains multiple ttf names for a given string in a language then allow the user to pick which one s/he likes best.
  - Another case where a bad otf table crashes fontforge
  - If a ttf/otf font does not contain a postscript FontName string in the name table, then ff's attempt to synthesize one out of fullname/familyname did not check for a valid name.
- 15-Nov-2004
  - If ff started without a prefs file, then creating a new font would crash
  - If a copyright string contained a newline then ff would generate bad postscript
  - If user added a comment to an empty glyph then the comment wasn't saved in the sfd file.
  - If ff saved a utf7 string to an sfd file (ttf names, etc.) and that string contained a hyphen that followed immediately after something that needed to be encoded in base64, then the hyphen would be lost.
  - new french UI
  - ff was (usually) setting the ascent/descent fields of the 'hhea' table to 0. When the font was drawn on the mac it was clipped to nothing. Caveat: Old sfd files are still broken and there is no UI for fixing them. Instead you must edit them manually, and change:

        HheadAOffset: 0
        HheadDOffset: 0

    to be:

        HheadAOffset: 1
        HheadDOffset: 1

- 12-Nov-2004
  - ff would crash on postscript fonts where the encoding included a glyph name not defined in CharStrings (probably broken on 12-Oct)
  - More remove overlap work
  - In the glyph window, when the scaled distance between the top and bottom of the window is less than 1 em-unit, then the vertical ruler was drawn with the top and bottom labels reversed.
  - sfd files used to have a limit of 1023 characters in ttf 'name' table strings.
- 6-Nov-2004
  - Encoding change broke prefs dialog
- 5-Nov-2004
  - Encoding change didn't work on libiconv systems
- 4-Nov-2004
  - Added a new scripting command: AddAccent() to add an arbetrary accent to an arbetrary glyph.
- 3-Nov-2004
  - KANOU has a Japanese version of this reference manual under construction.
  - In MultiLayered mode, the "New Layer" menu item left a dangling pointer which caused a crash if anyone looked at the background layer.
  - In MultiLayered mode, if one clicked beyond the last layer in the Layers palette, ff would crash.
  - KANOU provided a patch to fix another crash in the layers palette.
  - KANOU has provided a new Japanese UI.
  - Made an addition to CharInfo() scripting command so user can determine the horizontal extrema of a glyph at a given vertical position. Similar addition for vertical extrema at horizontal pos.
  - Add a scripting command (PasteWithOffset) to allow user to apply an offset when pasting. For building accented letters by hand.
  - KANOU provides a patch to fix a problem in the new encoding stuff.
  - Select(".notdef") usually didn't work.
- 28-Oct-2004
  - Kanou noticed that ISO 15924 has been updated and provide a patch including new scripts.
  - I have redone the way ff handles encodings internally. We used to depend on the encodings builtin to gdraw/gunicode. Now we use iconv() (if there is no iconv, then ff will use a dummy iconv which understands the encodings of gdraw/gunicode). Encodings are identified by name rather than by number now.
  - Further fixes to the extremum detector
  - Further fixes to remove overlap
  - Added an extra argument to scripting RoundToInt, so that you can have control over what it rounds to (ie. round to hundredths, tenths, etc.)
  - Added two new scripting commands NearlyHvCps() and NearlyHvLines() which look for control points or lines that are nearly horizontal or vertical and force them to be horizontal or vertical.
  - Kanou provided a patch so that the GRadio.Font resource controls the font in the layers palette of the glyph view.
- 23-Oct-2004
  - Remove overlap had problems with splines which made abrupt turns (ie. tiny splines after we found extrema points and divided the spline into bits between extrema)
  - Remove overlap could munch memory
  - The ruler tool showed all tiny splines as having a length of 0
  - Autorecovery had problems with glyphs containing features (would complain about sli)
  - KANOU wants to be able to scale greymap fonts
  - removed routines from fvcomposit.c, metricsview.c that were duplicates of fvfonts.c
  - Oops, the default mac filesystem isn't case concious either, extend the windows export patch to the mac.
  - Simplify didn't have a very good extremum detector and would sometimes delete extrema.
- 14-Oct-2004
  - Remove overlap had problems with tiny splines.
- 13-Oct-2004
  - I notice (in Fontes & Codages) that the labels in the metrics view aren't translatable
  - Fontes & Codages suggests that it would be nice if the glyph labels in the fontview could be something other than an image of the glyph (glyph name, unicode code point, encoding, etc.)
  - Change the word "Character" to "Glyph" where appropriate.
  - Move the Open Outline/Bitmap/Metrics commands to the Window menu, and change "Open" to "New".
- 12-Oct-2004
  - We have a Spanish UI now, courtesy of Walter Echarri. Yeah!
  - Support for loading type3 fonts (that ff produced) was broken. Note: ff is still unable to load many type3 fonts (any that are filtered, or that use images for example), but it should be able to read its own fonts.
  - (I hope) minor change to the way .notdef is handled when reading postscript files.
  - Added support for printing to pdf file
  - (fixed a bug in pdf generation from the export command)
  - Fixed various problems from turning off the multilayer bit in fontinfo
  - KANOU needs a couple more strings disambiguated.
  - Add support for generating type42 and type 11 (type42 cid) fonts, add support for loading type42 (but I'm not bothering with type11s) and use these guys when printing order2 fonts.
  - Check to make sure the PostScript Fontname is valid when reading in a truetype (or svg) font (syntax doesn't enforce this), and if not warn the user and fix it up.
  - Add some new scripting commands for handling MM fonts since someone seems to want them.
  - Used to complain if there were more than one Unique Font ID in the truetype 'name' table. (because the OpenType list said there should only be one, else it would not be unique). But both Apple and MS ship with fonts containing multiple Unique Font IDs. God knows what that means, or when you pick one over the other... Anyway I changed my error into a warning.
- 30-Sept-2004
  - I have rewritten Remove Overlap from scratch. I seems less likely to crash, but I'm not sure that in any other respect it is improved.
  - In the character view the Remove Overlap (and Intersect and Find Intersections) now only work on selected contours, or, if no contours are selected then on all contours. This change makes these commands consistant with most other commands in the character view, but it is a change from past behavior.
  - The Import scripting command has been extended to give the user control over the stroking flags (correct direction, remove overlap, handle erasers). And the background flag has been extended a bit to apply to other things than bitmaps.
  - ff had a pointer dangling to a freed block after loading a font containing multiple versions of some greek letters.
  - U+1D400-U+1D7FF are stylized variants of the latin and greek alphabets as used in Mathematics. The font view will now display (in the glyph header) the proper variant of the glyph (assuming it can find a font with that style).
  - The AMS (American Mathematical Society) has their own interpretation of the public use area. FF now understands their glyph names as alternates for those glyphs, and has an AMS interpretation (under FontInfo->Encoding) that will make ff use those names in new fonts.
  - Many of code points in the AMS PUA are reencodings of other glyphs. FontForge will automatically generate these reencodings for you.
  - The AMS also describes how some TeX glyph names map to unicode. So include those names in our alternate list too (so we can map them correctly, not as a way of encouraging people to use them).
  - Both the AMS defn. of the PUA and the Big5 defn. map characters which are properly in other unicode planes into the BMP. FF now understands this, and converting between a BMP encoding and a full unicode encoding will move things from the PUA to their proper unicode slot in higher planes.
  - Find Problems thought that adjacent splines intersected at their common end-point. I suppose they do, but it isn't useful information
  - In the char view, I used to blank out the status line when the mouse moved outside the window. But some of that info is still valid. So only blank out the meaningless bits.
  - Kanou requests a disambiguation between two strings with the same label in English but different meanings in Japanese. (Vertical/VerticalWriting)
  - The Point->Make Line command would crash if either of the the two points was missing a previous or next spline.
  - Pierre HANSER provides a patch to problems.c (it would crash when dealing with fonts with an encoding with < 32 code points.
  - Pierre HANSER provides a patch to merge fonts (it would crash when merging bitmap fonts.
  - Closing a charview window with a docked palette could cause a crash if the cursor was moved quickly into another charview which needed a new cursor.
  - The perspective icon had the wrong background
  - Piska keeps complaining about the way ff handles 0 width strokes. He wants it to have zero width (disappear, I guess), but PS says it should be stroked as the thinnest line possible (not clear what this should mean in ff, I interpret it as a 1em-unit stroke). But METAPOST uses a 0 width stroke in cases where it wants no stroking (with a fill) so in the special case of a fill with a 0 width stroke, turn off stroking.
  - Use a different approach to approximating a set of points with fixed slopes at the end points. Used to do least squares (fixup slopes), least squares again (fixup slopes). Now I do least squares (fixup slopes), perturb the lengths of the slope vectors until we find the best fit.
  - I was generating flex hints when I should not have done so. Add a heuristic so that ff doesn't add flexes to small circles.
  - Failed to read long format pk bitmaps.
  - Patch by Mchael Ghrken to make the Skew scripting command take a numerator/denominator style argument.
- 24-Aug-2004
  - Oops, didn't get the expand stroke scripting patch quite right
  - Changed the way preferences are handled in scripts
    - By default preferences are no longer loaded when starting a script.
    - Preferences are not saved in a script unless explicitly requested.
    - Added 2 new scripting functions LoadPrefs() and SavePrefs()
    - Added an environment variable FONTFORGE_LOADPREFS to give the user control over loading of preferences.
  - Used to have a preference item DumpGlyphMap. Now we have an equivalent flag in the Generate Fonts [Options] dialog.
  - The SetPanose scripting command didn't work. MURAOKA Taro provides a patch
  - It was not possible to get or set NewCharset preference item with GetPref/SetPref scripting commands. Now GetPref returns a magic number, which may be used in SetPref. SetPref will accept either a number or one of the encodings accepted by Reencode().
  - If you copied a glyph feature from a glyph that didn't have that feature, and then did a paste ff would crash.
  - Added two new tools to the outline character view. One allows you to rotated your glyph through 3dimensions (and project it back on the xy plane), the other allows you to do a perspective transformation.
  - Extended the Transformation dialog to handle 3D rotation+projection. After all it's just:

    cos(y-axis-rotation) | 0
    0 | cos(x-axis-rotation)

  - Add a Point of View dialog to do real perspective projections
  - Remove the FONTFORGE_CONFIG_NONLINEAR flag, and enable the nonlinear dlg perminantly. I need some of its routines to do the projective projections.
  - There was a path through LoadEncodingFile (in a script) where it would silently fail.
  - LoadEncodingFile would save default encodings even though it hadn't loaded them. It no longer does this, but now SavePrefs does it instead.
  - Added the ability to see (and create) simple substitutions in the font view.
  - The embossed box around the fontinfo dlg wasn't always in the right place
- 8-Aug-2004
  - Zhang Lin-bo reports two bugs (which were really three)
    - Expand Stroke failed when given a path consisting of a single point had a zero length spline returning to itself.
    - AddExtrema falls into an infinite loop if the initial spline of a path needs an extremum added to it.
    - Expand Stroke generates garbage output in some very obscure conditions.
    - AutoHint crashes when given garbage input.
  - Michael Gährken points out that ExpandStroke scripting command doesn't work for caligraphic stroking, provides a patch and an extension.
  - KANOU provides a patch for BDFMakeChar in CID keyed fonts.
  - Change the Shades palette in the bitmap view so that it shows what grey level is underneath the cursor.
  - When the width is huge, then moving it causes it to wrap into negative values. It should probably stick at SHRT_MAX instead.
  - If one moves to a negative width and releases the mouse, an error message pops up warning of this. If you move the cursor around the width continued to change.
  - If one moves to a negative width, and in response to the width warning says [No] then the width reverted to the wrong value.
  - ff would crash on a postscript sequence containing "{}" if that was the first function defined.
  - I got the locale wrong for Hong Kong
  - If nothing was selected in the import dlg (or any of the file open dlgs) and the user pressed [OK], then the directory would be returned.
  - Improved error message for Import dlg.
  - In spanish various dlgs had buttons that were too close together (and similar problems)
- 01-Aug-2004
  - ff did not generate amfm files correctly
  - Changed the Merge Kern Infor (menu item and scripting command) to
    - support pfm files
    - detect file type from the file header rather than from the extension
  - Added InterpolateFonts as a scripting command
  - Added GetEnv as a scripting command
  - The scripting $fontversion and $copyright psuedo variables broke when I added the fond name changes.
  - More problems with tfm files.
  - Fixed a couple of problems related to dialog sizing for different languages.
  - In Windows 3.1 some chinese fonts were released with a ttf version of 2 (rather than 1). Add this to the list of supported TrueType/OpenType versions (see discussion on freetype mailing list, july 2004 for more info)
  - Added both a menu and scripting command to copy kerning & substitution info from one glyph to another.
  - FontForge fails to load some svg fonts properly (if they use the "t" directive within a path => quadratic splines, control point implied, relative to last point). Result is a nasty scribble.
  - Windows file systems are not case conscious. The file names generated for Export use glyph names (which are case conscious). So on windows exporting "a" and "A" will overwrite the same file. (Add a "$" in front of capital letters to distinguish).
  - We were not scaling refs/images uniformly when we dragged corners. Instead we changed the sides by the same amount (this works for squares, but nothing else).
  - XML does not allow backspace as an input character, even when specified by an entity. This means we can't specify the unicode code point for backspace in a an svg font (and many ttf fonts contain a blank backspace char, god only knows why).
  - The Default ATT->Unicode decomposition didn't work.
  - Added a new entry to Default ATT, Caps->Small Caps (and cleaned up lower case->small caps too).
  - Eschew 0 width hints.
  - Add support for localized unicode glyph names (currently only french is available)
- 3-July-2004
  - Undoes in the Guide layer caused a crash (introduced with multi-layer)
  - Fixed another problem with subroutine references in type1 output
  - Preserve hhea.ascent/descent and some OS/2 values (no UI for these, but they are retained)
  - KANOU provided two patches
    - One to set the the average Char Width field of OS/2 properly
    - One to set the 'gasp' table so that Windows would actually use embedded bitmaps
  - Added support (in build accent) to look for upper case and cyrillic variants of accents (use grave.cap rather than grave, use breve.cyr rather than breve) when building upper case or cyrillic letters.
  - Points were not being properly renumbered if they were out of order (when editing in quadratic mode)
  - When a character had a color attached to it, it looked very strange if the user changed it.
  - Added an "x" to check boxes when checked
  - FF did not realize that tonos should be treated as an accent (it is spacing, which confused ff)
  - Cleaned up an ancient message in the nomen files. Used to be three seperate strings, now one with format specs in it.
- 18-June-2004
  - Point types were not set properly after conversion from quadratic to cubic splines.
  - Several preference items were not being saved and were not accessable from scripts.
  - Scripts could not set the resolution for bdf fonts
  - Still having problems with references to references in type1 subroutines.
  - AutoTrace had problems with multi-layered mode.
  - Enhance "ItalicConstrained" in the Character View to allow vertical constrains as well as those parallel to the italic angle.
  - Build Accented Characters had problems when there were bitmap characters involved.
  - Can no longer blindly rotate splinesets in type2 fonts to avoid an initial flex.
  - Add three new problems to Find Problems
    - Check for intersecting contours
    - Check for mulitple glyphs with same unicode code point
    - Check for multiple glyphs with same name
- 31-May-2004
  - In the 19-May build I introduced a bug which could generate NaN values for control points.
- 29-May-2004
  - The MergeKern scripting command didn't have the capabilities of its menu counterpart.
  - Enhance the pattern matching capabilities on font names when loading kerning information from a mac FOND (there is no place in the FOND that names the styles, so best we can do is make reasonable guesses).
  - When editing quadratic fonts (truetype), changing the type of a point to be a tangent caused the previous control point to be set the to same location as the next control point. Bleah.
  - New versions of libpng will not automagically load libz when they are loaded. Needed a patch to load libz manually.
  - Fixed a couple of bugs in contextual / chaining dialog.
  - When reading PostScript arrays FF failed to parse negative numbers properly.
  - Make it an error (which it should be) to create a mac postscript resource file without also generating an NFNT.
  - Warn that NFNTs don't work under OS/X, warn that POST resources are probably depreciated.
  - WinAscent/Descent were being saved incorrectly in sfd files, leading to bad WinAscent/Descent in t/otf OS/2 tables.
  - Crash in ExpandStroke from a NaN when try to intersect parallel lines
  - Improved Merge a little bit for quadratic splines
- 23-May-2004
  - Added popups in the Open Font dialog to show the fontname(s) of any font(s) in a file.
  - FontForge failed to load background images. A bug introduced 24-Feb (part of multi-layer)
  - Reordered the which glyph FF would pick when searching for accents. It used to use ASCII versions of the accents over those in the U+03xx range.
- 20-May-2004
  - Bug in scripting change for mac families.
  - Added a Paste After command (which isn't visible by default) which will allow you to build up words more easily.
- 19-May-2004
  - Give the user access to the OS/2 fields WinAscent and WinDescent.
  - Add a new command (Points->Make Line) which will turn a spline between two selected points into a line.
  - Improve the behavior of defaulting control points so we don't get self-intersecting loops
  - Add a mode to the pointer tool. Holding down the <Alt> key now means we don't join two open contours if they make contact while dragging.
  - When loading an otf file and saving it as ttf, sometimes the space glyph would become zero width.
  - Redid the way mac families were output. Should be more flexible under OS/X
- 9-May-2004
  - Several problems with tfm files. Didn't handle tfms with more that 128 lig/kerns.
  - Failed to set the r2l flag properly in 'morx' tables
  - More typos in the ghost hint code
  - Allow users to express error term of the scripting Simplify command as a fraction.
  - The strings in the context / chaining dlg's initial pane were wrong
  - Fixed some bugs in converting OT contextual substitutions to Mac state machines
  - If we wanted to put a glyph with references into a subroutine (in type1 output) we failed miserably
  - Added a new command Edit->ReplaceWithReference (and a scripting version too), which searches all glyphs in the font for any selected glyphs, and for each embedded occurance it replaces the outlines of the glyph with a reference to it. This is because reading a postscript (type2 or type1) font generally loses all reference information.
  - The documentation for OS/2.winAscent makes no sense. I shall ignore it and set winAscent to hhea.ascent
  - Sivan says that hebrew kerning is broken again.
  - The search dlg didn't work on quadratic (truetype) fonts
- 2-May-2004
  - I've changed the colour of check boxes because people found black confusing
  - FontForge read Italic Correction incorrectly out of tfm files and had minor problems generating tfm files.
  - the kern class dlg had an uninitialized variable (introduced with the multiple master code I think)
  - FontForge would sometimes crash when generating a GDEF table for some types of otf font.
  - Pierre Hanser has updated the french UI, and pointed out some problems with the english UI.
  - In a version of FontForge compiled with MultiLayer on, Pasting something containing a reference screwed up memory
- 25-Apr-2004
  - AutoHint produced ghost hints for curved stems that sometimes were outside of the character.
  - Fixed some uninitialized variables in MetaFont (but the algorthim is still flawed)
  - FontForge had problems when the fontview was maximized.
  - The 18-Apr patch for cubic->quadratic conversion had a bug which generally resulted in a crash.
  - When flickering in and out of compacted mode, during a Generate Fonts, the encodings in the displayed bitmap could get out of sync with those of the font leading to a crash.
  - Don't mess with the control points in point type conversion (corner->curve/tangent) when the they are already reasonable.
  - Allow rectangles and ellipses to have seperate settings of the center out flag.
  - Add a dialog which allows you to specify exactly where rectangles/ellipses should go.
  - Double-clicking on the scale/flap/rotate/skew tool brings up the transform dialog.
  - Add a couple of entries in the transform dlg option menus which copy information from the last ruler measurement.
  - Give the user control over how long the ruler window hangs around.
- 18-Apr-2004
  - Fix a couple of bugs dealing with references in multilayered editing.
  - Uninitialized variable in creation of 'name' table (introduced on 10-Apr)
  - Edit->Merge didn't work properly on quadratic splines
  - LCarets should have ignored the script assigned to them, but they didn't.
  - Put in more protection against bad GSUB/GPOS tables. In particular mangal.ttf has a bad GSUB table (with erroneous class specifications).
  - FontForge wasn't setting `'hhea'.caretSlopeRun` appropriately in italic fonts (should match `tan(italicAngle)`).
  - Oops. Can do much better converting from cubic to quadratic splines. We were getting far too many linear segments.
  - Our cubic->quadratic conversion could generate splines where the endpoints were less than 1 unit apart. Since ttf rounds all coords to ints, this meant we'd get the two endpoints on top of one another.
  - When generating a truetype font from a cubic database, FontForge calculated 'maxp'.maxCompositePoints incorrectly.
  - Gave the user control over when point numbers are visible (even for cubic fonts)
- 10-Apr-2004
  - The flatten commands didn't preserve the ttf 'name' table nor the 'OS/2' table
  - Redid the way 'name' table was generated, hopefully we do better for the mac now.
  - the 'kern' table had a bad rangeShift value (it was the negative of what it should be)
  - Pasting a reference from one font to another could crash if the destination font did not have the refered character.
  - ".null" was appearing twice in the 'post' table when saving a ttf file a second time.
  - Markus Schwarzenberg points out that the ScaleToEm() scripting command didn't work when given a single argument.
  - Pierre Hanser points out that the version fix on 4-Apr had a bug that caused crashes on Macs (perhaps elsewhere).
- 04-Apr-2004
  - Several more fixes for cff output.
  - We had a bad habit of including extraneous hintmask operators in output
  - Add a proper ff version (well, as much as my versions be proper) to postscript/svg output
  - Patch from Kanou about reading format 2 bitmaps in a sfnt
  - Patch from Kanou. MS requires a weird format for GSUB in vertical writing.
- 29-Mar-2004
  - When Type1 output needed to output a reference as inline splines (as opposed to a subroutine call or using a seac command) then it would lose any translation applied to that reference.
  - Patch to Type3 output from R.L.Horn
  - FontForge used to crash when reading in a bdf glyph with a bad bounding box.
  - Reading a kerning class from an sfd file when that class had more second character classes than first character classes would screw up memory and probably cause a crash.
  - Attempting to edit a 'cvt ' table in a font without one caused a crash. Attempting to edit a 'cvt ' table in a font with one showed an empty table.
  - Make scaling from the fontview apply to kerning and positioning data.
  - Drawing a rectangle by dragging from center out didn't work
  - Display phantom points when debugging. Be prepared to find either 2 (horizontal metrics) or 4 (both horizontal or vertical) depending on what version of freetype we've got.
  - Bug in both reading and writing encoding format 0 of cff fonts. I forgot to ignore .notdef so everything was off by 1.
  - If a glyph was used as a reference in another glyph, and we put it in a subroutine (type1 output), and it had hint conflicts, then the first group of hints never got output.
  - In multilayered mode, the Revert Glyph command left memory in a potentially bad state. (If you immediately closed the charview, then nothing bad would happen, but if you tried any editing in it, then nasty things happened.)
- 21-Mar-2004
  - When flattening a CID file fontforge lost track of the script/lang list (and other things) which caused bugs when dealing with substitutions
  - When saving multiply, fontforge could free a fonts hash table several times
  - When flattening by a CMAP file from a script fontforge could crash
  - Added a CIDFlatten command to scripting.
  - The "cleanup of OS/2" on 29-Feb actually broke WinAscent/Descent
  - When loading a mac unicode string from the 'name' table, fontforge failed to convert the language correctly.
  - When loading a mac contextual substitution statemachine, fontforge made egregious errors in guessing to what glyphs were usable for a substitution of the marked glyph.
  - Added the current encoding to the font's window title (also display a flag to show whether the font has been changed)
  - When moving points around on an order2 contour fontforge could end up with bad control points and would then produce annoying internal errors alerting the user to this fact.
  - The CID Flatten commands did not work when the view was compacted.
  - CharInfo had been deliberately disabled in CID fonts
  - Show ATT didn't work with CID keyed fonts
  - The preference mapping between mac and opentype small caps features was wrong.
  - Werner found a strange bug in splinefill that I can't reproduce (and can't understand how it could happen) but the fix appears obvious.
  - Add a command to show what glyphs use the current glyph in a substitution (so "A.swash" would show that "A" used it, and "i" would show that "fi" used it).
  - Changed the extension shown in the Generate Fonts dlg for multiple saves to ".pfb". Put in a %s to make it obvious that more will be added to the name. Support people who want .pfa fonts too.
  - The dialog for adding/editing correspondences between mac feature/settings and opentype features never went away.
  - Disable the Default ATT menu if no char is selected in the fontview.
  - FontForge sometimes had trouble drawing the correct rotated glyph in cid fonts on the display lines of the fontview.
  - Changed the way names used in cidmap files, so there are new cidmap files now.
  - The ShowAtt dialog could overwrite itself if there were enough aats in it. (and at one point the vertical scroll bar was set to the bounds of the horizontal scroll bar)
  - Still getting the windows ascent/descent wrong. This time in CID keyed fonts.
  - Add some new language translations for things like "Bold" (dutch, swedish, norwegian)
  - Dragging and dropping a char from the font view into the char info dlg (to create a substitution) created a crash instead.
  - Support more of postscript in the interpreter
  - Our svg fonts pointed to a not-yet-existing dtd file
  - Support for Apple's distortable fonts (sort of like truetype multi-master fonts)
  - Depressing the control key now makes popups live longer (until the mouse moves).
  - new command in MM menu: Blend to new font
- 2-Mar-2004
  - Changed name from pfaedit to fontforge

FontForge was first released on 2-Mar-2004. An earlier version of the program, called PfaEdit, was begun in Sept of 2000, released on the web 7-Nov-2000, and moved to pfaedit.sf.net on 21-Apr-2001.