I was in recent discussion in which the
Register as a font vendor page was mentioned, and it got me wondering: how do people find the vendor ID field in the OS/2 table to be useful? Or is it something that vendors do "because its in the spec" or "because the font tool asks me for it, though I don't know how it gets used"?
Comments
Font management apps have sometimes exposed the vendor ID and/or its human-friendly equivalent. This also seems like something the OS could also do. (Nudge, nudge.)
The typical Linux boxes these days come with about 5000 system-wide optionally installable ttf/otf/ttc/otc fonts, plus another 2000 fonts from TeXLive (usable by TeXLive only), many of the 5000 overlaps the 2000. I throw all of them at font validator every 6 months or so as a routine test (result posted to https://github.com/HinTak/FontVal-Tests-at-10pt).
A few thousand is perhaps large in windows land; on Linux it is just a lot of poorly maintained / not-much-used fonts which few cares either way since they are free... The mentality is different.