FontMenuNameDB behavior can be a bit confusing

[frankrolf]

I remember the FontMenuNameDB file used to be an integral file required to build an OTF – even for just building a single style. makeotf would fail without a FontMenuNameDB (and without a GlyphOrderAndAliasDB).

A while ago this changed, so makeotf can be called without much of that collateral – font naming will be deduced from the PS name within the UFO.

Today I noticed that the presence of a FontMenuNameDB which has unrelated names in it can make makeotf fail.
See attached projects for an example.

• Both projects contain a font.ufo file with PS name abc-def
• When adding this FontMenuNameDB (does not work.zip) project, makeotf will fail:

[Unrelated-Fontname]
	f=Unrelated
	s=Fontname

This behavior could be a deliberate decision, or an oversight – I just wanted to put it up for discussion.

does work.zip
does not work.zip

[punchcutter]

I thought this made sense because if there is a FontMenuNameDB then shouldn't it have the correct names for the font? If it only contains unrelated names then that seems like a big mistake somewhere and I would expect an error.

[punchcutter]

Well, I suppose if no name is found it could fallback to the behavior when no FontMenuNameDB exists, but if it did that I think it should still inform the user what happened.

[frankrolf]

Yes – I am encountering this when running buildmasterotfs in the context of building a Variable Font.
It could still be a perfect FontMenuNameDB, just not contain the names of the masters.

[punchcutter]

I'm doing the exact same thing so I made sure the FontMenuNameDB had all the master names just so I wouldn't run into this, but that totally makes sense to build the masters without requiring the names to be defined here.

[frankrolf]

As usual, this comes from me preparing a stripped-down exercise, where I found this behavior a bit counterintuitive.

[miguelsousa]

@frankrolf The error is coming from makeotfexe, right? IIRC makeotf.py doesn't parse the FontMenuNameDB file.

[frankrolf]

@miguelsousa Yes, correct! 😊