On 04/06/2011 02:13 PM, Jean Basile wrote: > --- En date de : Lun 4.4.11, Peter Nermander <peter at nermander.se> a ?crit : >> There are so many variables to look >> for, don't the different sites >> offering free fonts have some kind of review system where >> you can get >> hints on whether a font is good or not? (The problem might >> be that >> people who just use the font in PowerPoint for their >> birthday poster >> might think the font rocks, while it lacks glyphs essential >> to the >> majority of the world.) > > Somebody please correct me, but lately I am under the influence of thinking > fonts seem to be the poor man's clipart library. I have browsed a few free > sites and the result are always about some weird, barely readable fonts or > showing windings-like icons that might have some use. I have never spent the > paper to scale them as I feel Inkscape can do a way better job with real > cliparts. > > As for the technical side - that is quite straightforward, although it is not > quick. I just get a font browser (I am particularly fond of NexusFont, both > freeware and portable) and go though the list looking for the particular > characters I need in my work put aside the base latin letter. If the letters > don't match that font is useless. But I seem to find that freeware fonts mean > just a derivation of some other design and rarely have variations (bold, > italics, etc). Adobe foundry is impressing in how many variations they might > offer (not only bold, italics, bold-italics, but also thin, semibold, etc.). > >> Maybe that is what would be needed, a community based >> review system >> for free fonts? Probably needs to separate technical and >> readability >> issues from aesthetic issues. > > I think that would be a very bad idea. That would give the ability of people > like me to hijack the system. One competent guy might say font X is crap, yet > 25 like me might say it's the best font ever and all my powerpoints are done > with that one. Because people do find it difficult (maybe it's the white > background, maybe it's because they believe in WYSIWYG) to differentiate > between screen and print. > >> I think making a complete check of a font would take many >> days of >> work. Just checking that all the glyphs are in the right >> places >> probably takes a couple of days. Then checking kerning >> tables and >> things like that.... > > The glyphs part I've done in a few hours for more than 10.000 fonts. But how > can you check the kerning tables and what are ?things like that?? >
There is a tool which is part of fontforge called fontlint. I asked George Williams the author of Fontforge for a tool which could be used to test for "technical quality" of a font, so he created it. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/ Peter
