FontColle: an enhanced Google Fonts filter

chingru
chingru Posts: 1
in Font Technology

▌　https://fontcolle.com　▐



Google Fonts is a great place to dig for treasure, but its filtering is far too weak. Right now I can only filter for Variable Font, but sometimes I want to be more specific about whether it's the weight (wght), width (wdth), or optical size (opsz) axis.

My projects also occasionally depend on particular OpenType features, and I need to find which families offer stylistic sets (ss##) or historical ligatures (hlig). This comes up especially in font engineering, when I am curious how a certain feature was implemented and open source projects turn out to be the best teaching material. Google Fonts' filtering tools just are not there yet, so I built FontColle (Font Collection).

I think of FontColle as an enhanced Google Fonts filter. OpenType features, variable font axes, writing systems, languages, and on through UPM, hinting, color font format, x-height, cap-height ratio and more, all filterable.

Each font family page gives you live previews of every named instance, editable specimen text, a glyph browser organized by Unicode block, metrics data, designer bios, license, and ready-to-use embed code for Google Fonts, Bunny Fonts and Fontsource.

This site is only a directory and a filter. Every family stays under its original license. My thanks to all the open source designers and developers behind them.

The site itself is MIT license with source at https://github.com/rutopio/FontColle

Reports of any data or tagging errors are welcome, as are suggestions for new filter criteria, or any other feedback and ideas!
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Comments

  • Tofu Type Foundry
    Tofu Type Foundry Posts: 81
    Fantastic tool! I’ve often found the Google Fonts filters to be limited. Is there a way to filter by a specific supported Unicode character? Say I want to only see options that include a rare glyph like 2E4B ⹋ TRIPLE DAGGER, which isn’t necessarily linked to a language.
  • Erik
    Erik Posts: 19
    Tofu Type Foundry said:
    I’ve often found the Google Fonts filters to be limited. Is there a way to filter by a specific supported Unicode character? Say I want to only see options that include a rare glyph like 2E4B ⹋ TRIPLE DAGGER, which isn’t necessarily linked to a language.
    Google Fonts does offer filtering by character.  In the Filters panel, thereʼs a text‐entry box headed “Preview” (which may display the placeholder text “Type something”); enter the character(s) you wish to filter for.  Unfortunately, at the moment the triple dagger is so rare as to not be found at all.  If you filter by more than one character, youʼll get logical‐OR results; for example, right now I filtered by DOUBLE DAGGER + TRIPLE DAGGER (“‡⹋”) and got a listing of 104 fonts, all of which supported DOUBLE DAGGER and not TRIPLE DAGGER.
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,046
    Nice tool. The term "Superellipse" is quite specific. I’d call that filter “Square” or “Squarish” if you want to be more accurate.
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,046
    Oops, I now see that this category was defined by Google Fonts, not you. I guess it’s something for @Dave Crosslandto consider.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,731
    OFF-TOPIC

    My favourite story related to the superellipse is Piet Hein’s attempted intervention in the diplomatic disagreement over the shape of the Vietnam peace conference table.
  • Floor van Steeg
    Floor van Steeg Posts: 21
    Erik said:
    Tofu Type Foundry said:
    I’ve often found the Google Fonts filters to be limited. Is there a way to filter by a specific supported Unicode character? Say I want to only see options that include a rare glyph like 2E4B ⹋ TRIPLE DAGGER, which isn’t necessarily linked to a language.
    Google Fonts does offer filtering by character.  In the Filters panel, thereʼs a text‐entry box headed “Preview” (which may display the placeholder text “Type something”); enter the character(s) you wish to filter for.  Unfortunately, at the moment the triple dagger is so rare as to not be found at all.  If you filter by more than one character, youʼll get logical‐OR results; for example, right now I filtered by DOUBLE DAGGER + TRIPLE DAGGER (“‡⹋”) and got a listing of 104 fonts, all of which supported DOUBLE DAGGER and not TRIPLE DAGGER.
    Iosevka Charon does seem to support U+2E4B TRIPLE DAGGER. I'm not sure why it doesn't show up using the Google filter, but I could find it using my font manager Typeface app.

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