Are websites that generate specimens an effective way to avoid caching issues when updating and re-generating fonts?
(I'm used to generating to the Adobe fonts folder to avoid cache problems, but I am wondering what the best workaround is in the situation where access to that folder is prohibited or Adobe apps are not installed.)
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You can see the sample specimen here. That is a screenshot taken from the browser output.
BTW, I'd suggest turning off the full justification of those paragraphs—that would make it more useful for judging the width of /space.
Maybe I should have framed my question with more clarity about what I'm seeking: I will be teaching a type design course with students working on university Mac workstations, and I suspect their access to the Library innards will be restricted. It occurred to me that some of these web-based specimen generators might be a cache-problem-free alternative to actually installing the fonts. But I am seeking confirmation that they would work as I imagine. And here is my full wish list:
* Fonts can be displayed and printed without requiring installation or Adobe.
* Updated versions of the same font do not pose problems.
* Webpage can generate texts though alphabet is incomplete (either by reading the font file to recognize what is missing, by allowing us to list the glyphs that are complete, or just by allowing us to paste in the text we want to set).
Can anyone confirm that all of this is a) possible and b) existent?
You can drop a font on the page, and something will be generated, like these:
- http://www.cyreal.org/Font-Testing-Page/index.php
- https://fontdrop.info/
- https://wakamaifondue.com/ (by yours truly)
Or you can have a local web application generate a new specimen, every time you update something (the font, the content). Harder to set up, but you're not dependent on someone else's website.- SpecimenTools ( https://graphicore.github.io/mdlFontSpecimen/ )
- Specimen Skeleton ( https://www.kabisa.nl/tech/specimen-skeleton-the-universal-font-specimen-boilerplate/ ) by yours truly.
You certainly don't need anything from Adobe for any of this :-)https://glyphsapp.com/learn/eliminating-font-cache-problems
I don’t recall anything weird happening recently.
On a Mac, I now use Font Book to remove unwanted fonts, quit, relaunch and then install replacement fonts. I stick to the User Library. Of course most (but not all) font testing software must also be closed before and relaunched after. All rather tedious and seemingly not necessary on older MacOS and Font Book versions. I work between several computers spanning 15 years which all have idiosyncratic behaviours.
On Windows, I am grateful to get any fonts loaded at all and generally restrict my testing to Microsoft programs to see if font menus do what they should. Life is simply too short.
When it comes to browser-based testing, a 'hard refresh' is often not reliable, depending again on software versions. In Safari on a Mac, it seems you have to delete the entire browser cache! While it would be tempting to stick with a single browser that performed reliably, you'd only be looking at one OS and one browser's rendering combination. Surprises and disappointment may lurk elsewhere.
There is no alternative but to test in as many environments as possible. Has anyone ever documented these as a 'best practice' guide?
I just have to run a find and replace before I run the shell script that generates my instances and .ofts.
This is super helpful for one other reason: you always know for sure which version of the font you are seeing!
NexusFont: Fonts can be tested without installation;