How useful is the contour_count check? Some examples

After improving the check routine a bit by addressing issue #2612, I am not considering how useful the check is (in comparison to how it extremely often emits false-WARNs)

Here are my current concerns:

• Most families in the Google Fonts collection do not PASS this check due to false-WARNs.
• Should this remain as a WARN-level check?
• Should it be completely deprecated?
• Or should it be downgraded to merely INFO-level?

Example 1

Here’s a good example of the check detecting an actual problem:

zooming in:

Example 2

Another reasonable warning with the same font (the “divide” glyph only has dots but lacks a bar):

Example 3

Here’s a group of false-WARNs on OleoScript-Bold. The glyphs are actually good, but the loops in them result in a different count then what would be expected in most designs:

Example 4

Another good catch: weird contours self-overlapping in SingleDay-Regular glyph “f”:

[davelab6]

This may erase and hide genuine errors, however, which would survive into the production VF in which overlap is not removed.

Sure, but this is often to find a % without a bar in the middle, and a é where the acute overlaps the e because the marks as mispositioned will not be found today, as there are 2 contours, but will be found in this case. So the overlap-removed version is a separate check that also needs human inspection.

The check should have instructions to the human so they can do their job well 😃

[davelab6]

I believe the solution to this is to have more fine grained leveling of check results; some FAILs are extremely critical and some are important enough to be FAILs but are okay to wait to fix until later… and some WARNs are important to pay attention to, and some WARNs are not so important.

Viviana mentioned on a call that having the check output an alphabetically sorted, comma separated, single line, and, an alphabetically sorted, line break separated, list, of glyph names to check, would help users so they can copy and paste that list into their font editor to check these things.