font.familyName on Wingdings and other fonts not in UTF8

[roncli]

In 1.5.5, some fonts (specifically Microsoft fonts) do not decode to as string like other fonts. For example:

Script:

var fontkit = require("fontkit");
fontkit.open("C:\\Windows\\Fonts\\Wingding.ttf", (err, font) => {
    console.log(font.familyName);
});

Output:

<Buffer 00 57 00 69 00 6e 00 67 00 64 00 69 00 6e 00 67 00 73>

The hex translates to  W i n g d i n g s, but I see no way of getting to that from a simple .toString(encoding) call. What can I do to decode this? Further, is there something that fontkit can do to ensure that we get strings back for the family name, even if the font might be encoded strangely?

[devongovett]

Hmm, the hope was to avoid that. This commit changed the behavior to prefer strings over buffers: ff92ff5#diff-7e48a0b8d3d1d1ca0b56eefcf0328fcfR89.

Can you confirm that it was previously returning strings before 1.5.5 and is now returning buffers? If not, you may just need to install iconv-lite. That will enable broader encoding support.

[roncli]

No, it's returning buffers in 1.5.4, 1.5.5, and 1.5.7.

Seems as through records with nameID = 1 has the font name in a Buffer that's actually UTF8 convertible. Perhaps that can be a fallback?

[Pomax]

Have you tried using toString('utf16le')? (name records with platform=3 are encoded using UTF16, and all those leading zeroes strongly suggest this is still a utf16 byte layout)

[roncli]

Yes, but I got gibberish.

Digging into it some more, the encoding appears to be UTF 16 Big Endian, which is not a native nodejs conversion.

[Pomax]

Oh, that's a good point: everything in OpenType uses big endian ordering, even on hardware that does not use that ordering natively... I filed nodejs/node#12813 in the hopes that a next version of Node can address that, One comment there was that https://nodejs.org/api/buffer.html#buffer_buf_swap16 is available for this purpose.

[devongovett]

@roncli I want to figure out why it is returning a buffer in the first place instead of decoding it. Can you please email me the exact font you're using? devongovett@gmail.com.

[roncli]

@Pomax Thanks for looking into this! I did see that nodejs rejected a similar issue back in 2012/13: nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#4365 The requester didn't have a compelling reason to add it, however, and it was noted if one existed they'd consider it.

@devongovett I'll be sending that tonight when I get home, about 5 or 6 hours from now.

[devongovett]

The name table for that font includes strings in the Mac Roman encoding. There are no Unicode subtables. If you install iconv-lite alongside fontkit, more encodings will be supported. I tried it and it seemed to work.

[roncli]

Update on this, all I had to do was add iconv-lite to the dependencies of my project, and everything's fine. No code change was required.

Why is iconv-lite a devDependency for this project, out of curiosity? Seems this works like a charm.

[devongovett]

Because it's kinda large, so we don't want to include it in most cases since most fonts have unicode name tables.