External tool for stem weight measurement of font families?

Adam Ladd
Adam Ladd Posts: 278
edited August 8 in Type Design Software
I might be overlooking something obvious here (and know there are internal font editor tools for this)...

Are there any external tools—web-based or other—that can measure and report stem weights in a font family?

Example scenario would be to upload the .otf files from a family all together and then get a reporting or display of the unit width of stems for each font?

Ideally it could be displayed with some sample specimen text as a visual, not just data.

Comments

  • Adam Ladd
    Adam Ladd Posts: 278
    Is there perhaps nothing really like this currently?
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,464
    edited August 8
    I’m not aware of anything, but it seems like something that could usefully be added to Wakamai Fondue or another font examiner.

    It’s a bit of a puzzle, because it presumes a set of architectural features in a known character set that can be measured and presented. So maybe the way to begin is for you to suggest which features you want measured? Which stem weights, on which characters?

    [Ideally, the set of features is extensible to multiple writing systems, meaning compilation of meaningful measurement sets for different scripts.]
  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 336
    IIRC something in the DTL Fontmaster ecosystem does something like this and has done so forever.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,044
    IIRC, either Simon Cozens or Yanone has done some open source and probably command-line tool for this. Just busy with TypeCon at the moment or I would hunt it down....
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 85
    https://github.com/googlefonts/fontquant does something like that, though I have not tested it.

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