Map Apple's ftxvalidator checks for which we still lack corresponding Font Bakery checks

This issue was originally called “macOSX installation issue snags”, but in the meantime we deprecated the ftxvalidator wrapper-check, so now we have a different scope for this task. Please, read the issue thread for more details.

– @felipesanches, Oct 17, 2021

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Observed behaviour

I’m setting up a fresh computer that is macOS Mojave, 10.14.4, and having some issues.

The macOS installation instructions are a bit hard to follow, because there are little things that don’t work well, and I don’t know how to check whether it worked in the end.

In zshell (zsh), it seemed to fail:

 cd ~/Downloads/ ;
hdiutil attach osxfonttools.dmg ;
mkdir -p /tmp/ftx ;
cd /tmp/ftx ;
cp "/Volumes/OS X Font Tools/OS X Font Tools.pkg" . ;
xar -xf "OS X Font Tools.pkg" ;
cd fontTools.pkg/ ;
cat Payload | gunzip -dc | cpio -i ;
sudo mv ftx* /usr/local/bin/ ;
hdiutil: attach failed - No such file or directory
cp: /Volumes/OS X Font Tools/OS X Font Tools.pkg: No such file or directory
Error opening xar archive: OS X Font Tools.pkg
cd: no such file or directory: fontTools.pkg/
cat: Payload: No such file or directory
gunzip: (stdin): unexpected end of file
0 blocks
zsh: no matches found: ftx*

I then tried to install from Apple Developer. Font Tools for Xcode 9 seemed to work fine. However, OS X Font Tools gives this warning:

This package is incompatible with this version of macOS and may fail to install.

In bash, the terminal instructions seemed to work better, but I still don’t know how to test whether it actually installed. The ftx command just returns ftx: command not found.

Expected behaviour

I should be able to follow the instructions exactly, without scary-sounding warnings, then have an immediate way to confirm that they worked. For onboarding less-technical designers, this is even more important.

Resources and exact process needed to replicate

To replicate, one could set up a new user account on a mac, then follow the FB installation instructions.

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Small Update: I haven’t installed the OS X Font Tools package yet, and I think that I still have the tools I need for FontBakery. However, I will double-check that no FontBakery checks are skipped because of this decision, and report back if I do eventually install that.

[felipesanches]

com.google.fonts/check/ftxvalidator runs the command-line ftxvalidator tool on MacOS and that’s all. It is a wrapper just the the one we have around MSFontVal as well.

[felipesanches]

there’s a bunch of checks described in the verbose check results that we can map to current fb checks - or file issues to describe and implement the dogmas

@twardoch, would you be able to provide such input so that we could figure out the full set of font problems that ftxvalidator supposed checks for?

Once we have this info, I’d probably create a spreadsheet to map which font problems Font Bakery still does not check for.