Fixing fonts that raise a &DFLT table doesn't satisfy the spec. LangSysCount is not zero& error in Firefox

Did you ever got this infamous error message in Firefox debug console (with CSS error messages enabled) ?

downloadable font: Layout: DFLT table doesn't satisfy the spec. for script tag DFLT (font-family: "MyBeautifulFont" style:normal weight:normal stretch:normal src index:1) source: http://W.X.Y.Z/fonts/myfont.woff2
downloadable font: Layout: Failed to parse script table 0 (font-family: "MyBeautifulFont" style:normal weight:normal stretch:normal src index:1) source: http://W.X.Y.Z/fonts/myfont.woff2
downloadable font: GSUB: Failed to parse script list table (font-family: "MyBeautifulFont" style:normal weight:normal stretch:normal src index:1) source: http://W.X.Y.Z/fonts/myfont.woff2

In my case it was accompanied by an obvious visual bug: all of the text on my website was rendered with default "fallback" fonts (Arial, Helvetica...), not the ones specified in the CSS.

Why ? First, lets understand the origin of this message: under the hood, Firefox use ot-sanitize to check fonts. Hence you get a similar error message using this tool:

$ ot-sanitise myfont.otf
ERROR: Layout: DFLT script doesn't satisfy the spec. LangSysCount is not zero: 1
ERROR: Layout: Failed to parse script table 0
ERROR: GSUB: Failed to parse script list table
Failed to sanitise file!

Miracle of the Internets, I found an explanation for this specific error here, in the spare documentation of this very same project. Alas, without any suggestion for a fix :(

Strip 979 de xkcd: Wisdom of the ancients

But now I will demonstrate how to fix an .otf file presenting this problem. The following also works with .ttf / .woff / .woff2 files, and by the way, css3FontConverter is magic to convert your font files to all the formats needed to be displayed nicely in old browsers as well as modern ones : it even generates the CSS declaration !

Here comes the magic ttx command (from the awesome fonttools Python package) and good old sed to the rescue:

pip install fonttools
ttx -o myfont.ttx myfont.otf
tr '\n' ' ' < myfont.ttx | sed 's~\(<GSUB>.\<ScriptTag value="DFLT"/>.\++</DefaultLangSys>\)\s\+<!-- LangSysCount=1 -->\s\+<LangSysRecord.\+</LangSysRecord>~\1~' > myfont_fixed.ttx
ttx -o myfont_fixed.otf myfont_fixed.ttx

You can now test the output file with ot-sanitise : the check should pass !

Now the explanation on what this sed voodoo does: it deletes any <LangSysRecord> tag under ttFont > GSUB > ScriptList > ScriptRecord[ScriptTag="DFLT"] > Script in the .ttx file, in order to conform to the spec.

It would be waaay cleaner to this with xml2 / xmlstarlet / any other CLI tool that manipulate XML, but sed is very portable and can be found on any Unix system.