[OpenFontLibrary] An index for OFL fonts

[Peter Baker]

I've been lurking on this list for a while, never posted here before.
Hi everyone!

A couple of weeks ago, in response to a query on the XeTeX list, I
wrote a little Python/FontForge script (called fontswith) that
searches through a directory (with all its subdirectories) looking for
fonts with a specific set of glyphs. Turns out that this is a common
sort of need, and various people have produced home-rolled solutions
(Perl scripts, PHP scripts ...). Mine has a number of friendly
command-line switches, can search ttf, otf, ttc, pfb and pfa fonts,
and can speed searches by building an index for future use.

A little while after Iwan Gabovitch posted the link to an archive of
OFL fonts it suddenly occurred to me that one didn't actually have to
have fonts installed or even present on the system in order to search;
one just had to have the index. So I've made an index for the OFL and
posted it along with my script, here:

http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/fontswith/

There's only one hitch, namely that several of the fonts in the
archive are inaccessible for some reason: instead of the font, I have
a 14-byte text file containing just the phrase file not found. These
are the fonts in question:

OFL-OSP_-_NotCourier-sans.ttf
OFL-OSP_-_NotCourier-sans_1.ttf
OFL-PhaistosDisk_-_Layne_Rook.ttf
PD-chemoelectric_-_Goudy_Bookletter_1.otf
PD-Daniel_J_-_Rahel.otf

I suppose there's some easy fix for this; but in the meantime I hope
folks will enjoy having a simple way to discover which OFL fonts have
glyphs that answer some particular need.

Best wishes,
Peter Baker

Re: [OpenFontLibrary] An index for OFL fonts

[Ed Trager]

 IIRC Dave's presentation of the features of the OFLB at the last LGM had
 a nice php frontend with jquery and fontaine magic underneath to report
 interactively on the coverage of a font, a font covering part of the
 Turkish writing systems was used as an example I think.


That was something I wrote with the intention of it eventually being
integrated into OFLB.  More recently I have been thinking that it
would be useful as a stand-alone service too.  I plan to add it to my
unifont.org site as soon as I have time to do so.  Unfortunately, I've
been uber busy the last few weeks with no down time at all, so this
too will have to wait a bit ...

-- Ed