Font naming and version control - incl. different formats

KP Mawhood

End user perspective - compliance workflows

To 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!

Paul van der Laan

The Python FontTools library gives access to the contents of most common font file formats. For OpenType and TrueType fonts it will be a matter of writing a Python program that can iterate through folders with font files, open them via FontTools, and then collect all necessary info from the 'name' table. Additionally the code can check for the existence of a 'glyf', 'CFF ' or 'CFF2' table to determine whether the font is TrueType or PostScript flavoured.

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!

Thomas Phinney

Katy, can you more clearly define the purpose of this tracking? Is it about licensing compliance only? Or are you also concerned with version tracking or making sure the "same" version of the font is being used at different stages? (design and output, perhaps)

KP Mawhood

@Paul van der Laan
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.

John Hudson

For small suppliers and author-supplied content, version tracking often falls into risk management.

Well stated.

Thomas Phinney

OK. I will second the nomination of ttx/FontTools for this purpose. Of getting the data, I mean.