MS Font Validator buildable with MS Visual Studio (again)

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Short version: you should be able to double-click the solution file at the top and select build, or type "msbuild" on the command line, if you are on windows and have visual studio 2008 (express) +.

3 years on, 1/2 to 2/3 of Font Val users are still windows based, with about 1/3 mac users, and a small minority (<10%) Linux users, so drawing windows-based contributors seems important.

=== repost from typedrawers

Almost exactly 3 years ago (3 years ago last week), MS Font Validator was open-sourced on github.

A few months ago before that, when the (partial) code base was made available to me, a few components were excluded, and with the consequence that the MS visual studio solution/project files no longer worked and was removed also. As the intention was to allow the libre/Linux community to work on it, I quickly figured out how to build it with Mono, a MIT-licensed dotnet compatible development/runtime system, and wrapped a new build process into a GNU Makefile. So that's the unusual choice of tool-chains and build process we are with for the last 3 years.

It has proved useful as Font Validator was then made operational on Linux and Mac OS X.

However people knowledgeable of Mono are rare; so I have always hoped that somebody more windows- and visual studio- centric will re-implement a more orthodox MS visual studio -based build process.

Two people did, about a year ago, independently. I am grateful of that. I shall try to borrow some ideas from their work in time. These effort also affect the (admittedly extremely unusual) Mono-based build process, so I couldn't incorporate them as they are. Recently I finally took some time to make building Font Validator with MS Visual Studio operational again, without affecting the Linux/mac mono-based build process.

So I tagged FontVal-2.1.3. It is buildable with MS Visual Studio 2008 (Express); and I have done some tests to verify the build result binaries are working properly too. Visual Studio Express/Community Edition is free-download and free-use. Hopefully this will allow people who are more comfortable with MS Visual Studio to contribute towards improving Font Validator.

https://github.com/HinTak/Font-Validator