End user perspective - compliance workflowsTo improve our validation process for font compliance, I'd welcome any insight to collect and collate font data. Currently we cover eight ID items, but this is still not sufficient. For instance, in our typesetter's software workflow Fairbank's name was declared as "FairbankMT Std-Regular". An example with Fairbank is below, we have a similar listing for around 7,000 fonts.
Name: Fairbank MT Std
Family Name: Fairbank MT Std
PostScript Name: FairbankMTStd
Style: Regular
Unique Name: Unique Mono - Fairbank MT Std
Format (detailed): OpenType (Flavored)
Version: Version 1.000;PS 001.000;hotconv 1.0.38
License Info URL: NI
We'd like our data to be comprehensive for as many situations as possible, to enable us to be systemic in our processes. Our font data is currently derived from FontExplorer, which I believe does not list every ID – are there better tools for this?
We also have issue determining a good process for LaTeX font naming, as this does not include the same IDs. I am not aware of appropriate metadata / means to collect metadata, besides the file name / font name. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Comments
Output could be a tab-seperated text file which can be imported in a database or spreadsheet.
Not sure what font formats are exactly used by LaTeX (pfa?). There is a chance that FontTools will be able to open that format too. But you will have to check that particular file format spec how it stores the naming.
Hope this helps!
Thanks, I met up with Karl Stange at Pearson – and he demoed FontTools. Looks great, I'll take the time to sit down with this. Any pointers towards python / bash scripting to copy-paste / adapt (GitHub etc.) is much welcomed.
I'll experiment with the LaTeX formats in font tools (.afm, pfa, .pfb, .pfm, .tfm, .vf… etc). It's the font-related files that also concern me (.fd, .map, .enc, .def… etc).
@Thomas Phinney Sure – it's about automating workflows, for compliance. Naming discrepancies add to our need for manual intervention. For small suppliers and author-supplied content, version tracking often falls into risk management.
Well stated.