Vector Glyphs: any ideas?

General
1

Apologies for the ramble, question at the end:

When I started with RB, I had and shipped a truetype font holding hundreds of custom glyphs.
(It was always a problem.
Under windows, it was a struggle to find an installer that would reliably install the font.
Under OSX, even harder to install the font. ‘Copy this file to Fonts folder’ won’t cut it these days.
Some people could use the font, but on others OSX reported it as corrupted and refused to open it.)

So eventually I abandoned using a font and switched to a set of bitmaps.
This had advantages over installation : customers could amend the glyphs if they wanted to, using paint programs instead of expensive font editors.

But I’ve never been entirely happy with this.
Especially because one possible output is a PDF file and the file is much larger than it needs to be because it contains bitmap data.
Theres a compromise between size and jaggyness.

Like many things, new versions of OSX and Xojo have abandoned support for vector images.
(These days, new versions of anything seems to remove features, not add them.)

The questions:
If you wanted to hold and use a set of vector shapes for current(ish) versions of Xojo, how would you hold them and store them?
(Cross platform)
How would you edit them?
Could an end user edit them for themselves?
Could the vectors go natively into a PDF file?
Is there a relatively painless way to generate these, starting from a truetype font?

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[quote=158547:@Jeff Tullin]Under windows, it was a struggle to find an installer that would reliably install the font.
Under OSX, even harder to install the font. ‘Copy this file to Fonts folder’ won’t cut it these days.
Some people could use the font, but on others OSX reported it as corrupted and refused to open it.)[/quote]

You may already know my main business is fonts. Maybe you can go back to that technology, which is both lightweight and very convenient with high dpi screens.

Under Windows I use CreateInstall.com ; it has never let me down and is thousand light years easier than other installers.

In Mac, if you don’t plan on making the font available to other apps, you can use a custom font placed into the bundle, so it does not require any installation. I use that in almost all the apps I have in the MAS.

See https://forum.xojo.com/5179-mac-os-custom-fonts

I have employed successfully both the ATSApplicationFontsPath info.plist key, and the CTFontManagerRegisterFontsForURL declare Sam Rowlands taught me.

[quote=158547:@Jeff Tullin]If you wanted to hold and use a set of vector shapes for current(ish) versions of Xojo, how would you hold them and store them?
(Cross platform)[/quote]

SVG seems to be the most common format today. See https://forum.xojo.com/1819-svg-support where Norman Palardy posted sample code to support it.