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.
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.
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!
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?
Comments
Karsten Luecke has a PDF with some helpful tips regarding font (family) naming: http://www.kltf.de/kltf_otproduction.htm
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:
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?
works very well for me.