akshara

Akshara (Sanskrit akṣara: a letter, a syllable; and, as a-kṣara, THE IMPERISHABLE — that which does not wear away). An sfnt reader that names a typeface from its bytes, and NEVER THROWS: a file it cannot read comes back as a null face and one sentence saying why, because a font picker that throws on the seventeenth file in a folder has lost the other two hundred. It reads the table directory of a ttf, an otf, a ttcf collection and an uncompressed WOFF; the name table at its BEST-SCORING RECORD PER NAME ID — Windows Unicode in English first, then Windows Unicode in any language, then the Unicode platform, then Mac Roman, with an encoding it does not decode scoring zero and being skipped rather than guessed at — decoding UTF-16BE by hand, dropping an odd trailing byte because half a code unit names no character, and Mac OS Roman from Apple's own 128-character upper half written out in full, including that 0xF0 is Apple's logo and lives only in the private use area. It reads OS/2 for usWeightClass and usWidthClass, falling to 400 and 5 where a face declares neither and taking the italic bit from head's macStyle where there is no OS/2 at all; and fvar for a variable font's axes and its named instances, every coordinate read as signed 16.16 fixed point and tidied so 400 reads as 400, with a PostScript name per instance where the record is six bytes wider than its coordinates rather than four. PARTIAL READINGS ARE KEPT: a name record pointing outside the file is skipped and the records around it still read, so one bad string does not cost the whole table, and an instance record reaching past the end ends the walk rather than inventing the rest. Weight and width are given in words with the number KEPT where the face sits between two named steps, so 350 reads as Light (350) and not as a bare Light, and a width class outside 1..9 is named by its number. A WOFF2 and a zip are refused by WHAT THEY ARE, each with a sentence saying what to do instead. IT NAMES; IT DOES NOT DRAW — no glyph outlines, no cmap, no kerning, no shaping, no rasterising, no font loading. It takes bytes only: no host surface, no DOM, no disk, no clock, no network, zero imports. NO FONT SHIPS WITH IT: every font its proofs read is synthesised in the proof, byte by byte, with real table checksums.