[scribus] How to tell a font is print worthy?

[Peter Linnell]

On 04/06/2011 02:13 PM, Jean Basile wrote:
> --- En date de : Lun 4.4.11, Peter Nermander <peter at nermander.se> a écrit :
>> 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