Typeface identification

Peter Flynn peter at silmaril.ie
Tue Apr 25 22:58:53 CEST 2023


On 25/04/2023 20:50, Ken Moffat via tex-live wrote:
[...]
> As a native English speaker, most of the details for how to describe
> the variations in fonts are not common knowledge.  

Yep. Talk of bowls and bracketed serifs is baffling for the font beginner.

> [...] Those results are at http://zarniwhoop.uk/ttf-otf-notes.html 
> (now old, but very little now changes in unicode for the subset of
> current languages found on the web).

That is a very useful page. I'd like to refer people to it when they 
want to find out about language support.

> Please note it is plain http://, also (if anyone accesses it) the 
> 'Please send any comments to' should be disregarded - that address 
> no longer gets to me.

Noted.

> [...] (very subjective, my ideas of niceness are a million miles away
> from Knuth's).

American and European typographic aesthetics have some significant 
differences too :-)

> Oh, and for general creation of (non-TeX) documents it helps to not
> have very many fonts (scrolling down though several hundred when
> editing a paragraph to use a new font is not fun).

I can't imagine what it must be like to be stuck with a graphical font 
selection tool that insists on using each font to render each entry in 
the drop-down menu, when you have several thousand fonts to pick from.

Peter


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