What software do you test in?

James Puckett

What software do you test your fonts with? I test in Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop, Textedit, Wordpad, and Word. And for testing in the non-Adobe apps I just open a file and make sure all of the characters appear without .notdef showing up. I’ve never tested a font in QuarkXpress, CorelDRAW, or any of the FOSS apps. Is there some important software other than the basic Adobe/Apple/Microsoft apps that I should worry about?

Roel Nieskens

Browsers?

c.g.

I'd say that testing fonts on Word on Windows, better if an old version, is very important.

Weights below 250 don't work correctly, and you can see immediately if there are uncovered unicode ranges set (unless you have a .notedef glyph with no countours):

John Butler

Yes, definitely test Word, the older the better.

Recently I bought a license to H&Co Requiem only to find that Word 2010 chops off the descenders.

Given that Word still has not fixed its artificial small caps problem, I gave up on Word entirely and use LibreOffice Writer or Scribus instead, neither of which mangles fonts like Word does. Meanwhile Google won’t let Outlook versions older than 2016 to even connect to Gmail. To this day the Word team still cowers and grovels obediently before the angry Gods Of Document Reflow.

If you are forced to care about customers who are forced to care about Word, pay close attention to the vertical metrics and chopped off extenders. I don’t know specifically how to fix it, but you should at least check to see if the problem affects your fonts. I don’t know whether the advice in the recent vertical metrics thread covers behavior in Word or not.

c.g.

John Butler said:

I don’t know specifically how to fix it.

If interested, and if you're familiar with command line, I have a set of scripts still unpublished. One of them aligns the vertical metrics of a family according to the recommendations of this document by Karsten Lücke: https://kltf.de/download/FontMetrics-kltf.pdf

For the record: I have synced Requiem via Monotype App and I see no chopped descenders, but I have Word 365.

John Hudson

On Mac, I test in Pages as well as various InDesign apps. Pages is a good test platform for Apple’s Core Text engine.

Yves Michel

Speaking of text fonts here, not display or titling fonts.

After testing my fonts in Word and on my printer and before finishing them and publishing, I download the font on our two Kindle readers to test on the novel(s) we're reading. I correct some glyphs following this, be it contours, metrics or kerning.

I don't know if the Kindle way to treat Truetype fonts is the nec plus ultra but I'm satisfied as it recognizes most of the special features.
This could be the subject of another topic.

bdenckla

I'm not sure if you meant to include automated testing, but I test using Python code that uses the following:

• simoncozens/vharfbuzz: A user-friendlier way to use Harfbuzz in Python (github.com)
• googlefonts/collidoscope: Brute force detection of glyph collisions (github.com)

John Butler

That’s good news that the current Word may have fixed it. I wonder if it handles the OT feature small caps by now. But every dollar I spend on Microsoft and Adobe upgrades is one less dollar I can spend on fonts.

Here’s what I’m talking about with Word 2010. It chops off just enough Requiem to taunt me. @Nick Shinn, it treats your Dair even worse.

To be clear: I’m not expecting type designers to guarantee this amount of legacy compatibility. Just know how to look out for it if you have customers who happen to care about it.

c.g.

Not sure it's a Word issue. You told you licensed Requiem from H&Co, while the files used in the screenshot are from Monotype.



Another thing: a check if at least uprights and italics are linked would be appreciated:



(Synced from Adobe Fonts)

John Butler

Yes, the Requiem uprights and Italics are style-linked. I bought the license directly from H&Co not long before the Monotype buyout.