[Tfug] OT: font utility

[Rich]

Best tool I've used is Font Book in Mac OS X. Surprise surprise.

Yes, you have to own all those fonts and manually categorize them,  
but typography is an art, not a science.

Let's think about why it hasn't been done (or if it has, why it's not  
well known). Bad typographers will always use crappy fonts. Such a  
tool would turn the tables and end up being used by crappy foundries  
to recommend "alternatives" to classics such as Helvetica and  
Garamond. Line height is often changed, kerning is usually left  
unconfigured, or it's mangled. That is, unless it comes from a  
typographic virtuoso, in which case you'll know already, or be able  
to guess which fonts they're using.

In short, the payoff is small compared to the effort of writing an  
effective glyph-matching tool: it doesn't improve the situation, and  
it doesn't change the fact that you'll still have to rummage through  
a bunch of likely alternatives.

And then there's the simple fact that people don't look at how well  
the fonts kern -- they just read the words and hand over their credit  
card.

So given all that, body type is easy: just pick a similar weight of  
sans or serif font, and substitute away. Even substitution of display  
fonts is simpler than it first appears: only a typographer will  
notice if you're using (expensive) Curlz instead of (cheap) Girls Are  
Weird. So use the cheap one: no tool required.

Rich.



On Sep 16, 2009, at 11:16 am, Bexley Hall wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I do a fair bit of DTP.  Often, I have to "match" some
> details of existing documents that I had no part in creating.
> One of the most annoying (tedious, unrewarding) aspects of this
> is finding the right *fonts*.
>
> Unfortunately, fonts have become ubiquitous and inexpensive.
> And, with font factory software, it is way too easy for
> folks to crank out (crappy!) fonts at no/low cost.
>
> As a result, I see documents with lots of "no name" fonts
> that are often *close* to industry standard fonts but "not quite
> right (e.g., they may have changed some glyphs or replaced
> some with alternate symbols, etc.
>
> It *seems* like it should be possible to scan a sample of a font,
> manually identify the glyphs in that sample (i.e., so you don't
> need to rely on OCR) and then search a database of font images
> (that you have built using another tool?) for a close match.
>
> Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like the type of tool a
> commercial vendor is likely to produce (I assume there is only
> a very small market for it as having access to the *source*
> documents would eliminate the need for this tool!).
>
> But, maybe someone has come up with a "toy" that does the
> same thing?
>
> Alternatively, some ideas for google searches that could be fruitful?
> Most of my searches have turned up tools that let you *visually*
> compare fonts.  This seems to be a misnomer -- I would call that
> *previewing* the fonts (even though you might be previewing two or
> three at a time). By contrast, *comparing* the fonts seems more
> ideally suited to a mechanization...
>
> Thx,
> --don
>
>
>
>
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