OS/2 vendor ID

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Peter Constable
Peter Constable Posts: 256
in Type Business
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"?
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  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,015
    I think it is highly useful, insofar as vendor ID is a bit more stable than the exact wording of a company name, which sometimes gets tweaked over time, and involves searching for strings in a copyright and/or trademark field. Also, sometimes there might be no copyright or trademark but still a vendor….

    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.)
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 312
    edited August 2021
    In our font editor we expose this field to the user. On the other side, in our font manager we do show the registered name for all registered vendor id's.

    We know this combination encourages font designers to register and use their own vendor id.

    Fun fact; five years ago a font addict allowed us access to his computer, so we could see how our font manager was able to maintain over 650 thousand fonts. At least 10% of those fonts were made with FontCreator, as all of them contained our vendor id ;-)
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 256
    Erwin Denissen said:
    Fun fact; five years ago a font addict allowed us access to his computer, so we could see how our font manager was able to maintain over 650 thousand fonts. At least 10% of those fonts were made with FontCreator, as all of them contained our vendor id ;-)
    Nice! Early in the Windows 7 development cycle (c. 2007), there was a special opt-in telemetry program that the Windows org conducted with some thousands of US participants, and we were able to gather data about numbers of fonts installed on their devices. As I recall, the most was around 3,500. You found someone that beat that by two+ orders of magnitude!
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    Wow, 650 thousand fonts on one computer!?

    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.

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