Corpus Analysis: Why?

Erin McLaughlin

Hi! Something that has always puzzled me is how type designers use corpus analysis in their process. How does knowing the frequency of glyphs, or glyph pairs influence your decision making?
In the non-Latin script arena, I can see that information as being useful if you're trying to determine which conjunct glyphs (via GSUB) to include in your font. But what else do you find it useful for? Just curious

Craig Eliason

I imagine it'd be useful for strategizing ligatures in a connecting script.

James Puckett

I’ve mostly used it regarding conjuncts in Devangari. And occasionally I use it to try and find out if and how a character is used when documentation of a character in a certain language is lacking.

Deleted Account

Pair frequency I don't do much about. Raw frequency I've used for editing bitmaps, where in the rounding of each glyph, frequency can be used to maintain linearity with its outline font, and secondly, to make text faces that are more economical, slight condensation of more popular characters can have a major impact on paper costs. 

Chris Lozos

I rarely look at pair frequency anymore, and then only if I am wondering if I need bothering to kern a rarely if ever used combination.

Ray Larabie

I use pair frequency in the case of textured designs where, instead of using cycling alternates, I use ligatures. For example, designs with scratches, splatters or pattern elements that span 2 or 3 letters. I used pair & triplet frequency charts from several languages to compile a master list.

Georg Seifert

It can help deciding what kerning exeptions one should add. 

Dave Crossland

I used 'em to design early phase sketch words; vowels + most common consonants