Typeface Name Check

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Comments

  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    That wouldn't work for all unfortunately, since many foundry websites still use Flash or images for text, infinite scrolling/AJAX and so on. Also scraping involves too many manual correction since you never know if it's really a typeface name or if the foundry added t-shirts or anything else to the same DOM elements where they listed type face names the week before.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    How do you handle updates? :)
  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    Not by scraping ;)
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,007
    Lars, you should talk to David at Identifont about including his DB.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    Lars, I agree that it wouldn't work for all and some will need to be maintained by hand. 
  • Robby Woodard
    Robby Woodard Posts: 9
    I have often thought that some kind of name checking service world be really cool. Thanks Lars! It would really be awesome if it went one step further and helped figure out and test font family naming conventions. That whole process always drives me firkin' crazy.
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 674
    The family naming stuff should be dealt with in the font design app. It's not complicated in itself, only the user interface is.
  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 269
    Robby, 

    Karsten Luecke has a PDF with some helpful tips regarding font (family) naming: http://www.kltf.de/kltf_otproduction.htm

  • Robby Woodard
    Robby Woodard Posts: 9
    I study Karsten's charts every time I start trying to generate families but Fontlab allows me so many options to screw things up that I invariably do. But that is a whole other subject. Lars's namecheck says my font name is available and I am happy enough with that for now!
  • Lars Schwarz
    Lars Schwarz Posts: 114
    edited January 2015

    I've been thinking about easy ways to push updates into the name check tool instead of pulling updates from every foundry/type designer website.

    All available (common) techniques of publishing machine-readable data (RSS, RDF, microformats, XML and so on) require specific software or a developer to implement it.

    humans.txt uses a simple text file located on the server which can be created using a simple text editor, but it isn't structured since it's meant to be read by humans not software.

    Nevertheless having a simple text file like this in a CSV (comma separated) manner could be one approach. Such a file can be easily created even without installing specific software on the server or requiring a developer. Basically you could create a list of all faces available from your foundry in any OpenOffice or Google Docs and export it to csv and upload it to your web server root directory.

    Regarding the structure I would suggest having only basic meta information included like:

    Font name
    Foundry name
    Designer(s) name
    Publication date
    Web font available yes/no
    License (Libre or not)

    The foundry name would be required even the »feed« (file) is located on your domain name and the foundry name can be easily guessed, but distributors sell fonts from various foundries. Also the foundry name cannot always be determined from the foundry's website domain name/URL.

    Besides the name check tool other web sites could of course consume this feed to gather information about new type face releases.

    What do you think? Anyone wants to join by publishing such a feed?

    Suggestions for a name: fontfeed.txt ;) Ha, no, better something like fontlist.txt?

  • Michiel Drost
    Michiel Drost Posts: 42
    Dear Colleagues, Thank you all for your comments on my query. http://namecheck.fontdata.com/
    works very well for me.

  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    Sounds rad. https://github.com/toml-lang/toml ?

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