[makeotf] consume tx stderr

[benkiel]

(this is a weird edge case, so feel free to close)

When running makeotf from inside another script and redirecting stdout and stderr to a file, the tx errors when converting a format

afdko/python/afdko/makeotf.py

Line 2019 in d0ccb71

if not fdkutils.run_shell_command(['tx', '-t1', filePath, fontPath]):

are still printed to stderr (in my case, complaints about underline thickness). I think that if that line was change to consume stderr (as in #751) this would go away. (think as i've not had time to test that change)

[josh-hadley]

Out of curiosity: did this ever work the way you wanted it to (i.e. in older versions of AFDKO)? The reason I ask is, we've been tinkering with that run_shell_command routine to work around some intermittent issues with our automated testing. Maybe we need to give it some more attention. Can you attach (or describe) a simple test case that reproduces this?

[miguelsousa]

@josh-hadley before 5f6f575 the messages from tx and other commands were always discarded (see all the 2>&1 tokens thruout). I understand Ben's request but I don't think we should go back to muting everything by default. Perhaps a workable solution is to enabling switching them off by piggy-backing on an existing makeotf option.

[benkiel]

@josh-hadley Yes, I can put together a sample script. For what I was doing, I've gone back to subprocess like so:

args = ["makeotf", "-f", file, "-o", outputPath, "-r", "-nshw"]
run = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, universal_newlines=True)
with open(path, "w") as f:
    f.write(run.stdout)

which consumes the even the tx output from makeotf when making a TTF.

Previously I was doing:

from contextlib import redirect_stdout, redirect_stderr
args = ["-f", file, "-o", outputPath, "-r", "-nshw"]
with open(os.path.join(outputPath, f"makeotf_output.txt"), "a") as f:
    with redirect_stdout(f), redirect_stderr(f):
        makeOTFParams = makeotf.MakeOTFParams()
        makeotf.getOptions(makeOTFParams, args)
        makeotf.setMissingParams(makeOTFParams)
        makeotf.setOptionsFromFontInfo(makeOTFParams)

        makeotf.runMakeOTF(makeOTFParams)

That wouldn't catch the output from tx when it was run to convert the TTF for making a TTF.

Again, I don't think this is a big issue, and should likely be closed. Subprocess is likely the better way to run this, not calling it directly in another script.

[josh-hadley]

Closing, per discussion.