Specimen Tools for websites

Usage/Markup Examples

Currently the main usage is in mdlFontSpecimen.

However, the main documentation of the available widgets can be found here.

There is a minimal example. You can run it like this:

~$ git clone git@github.com:graphicore/specimenTools.git
~$ cd specimenTools
~/specimenTools$ bower install
# now start a http-server to serve from ~/specimenTools
# e.g. python3 -m http.server 8000
# visit: http://localhost:8000/examples/simple/index.html

The widgets have some documentation in their js files.

Bootstrapping, Signals and Life Cycle

Have a look at the minimal examples/simple/main.js.

All signaling is done via a single central instance of the PubSub module.

The order of subscription is relevant, it may be important to have some modules subscribe before/after other modules. Currently, subscribing the services FontData and then WebFontProvider first is expected by other modules.

Subscription is usually done in the constructors.

Bootstrapping

1. Initializing the "services". The widget constructors will require them to be injected at their initialization time.

• Initializing the widgets. The document will be searched for the widgets CSS-class and the resulting containers will each be initialized with a new widget instance.
• A callback is subscribed to the allFontsLoaded channel, to activate a first font when loading is completed.
• Font loading starts, calling loadFonts.

loadFonts is publishing to the following channels:

prepareFont with arguments: (int) fontIndex, (string) fontFileName

Directly before the actual file loading is executed. If the file loading is asynchronous (it is) all prepareFont signals will be sent before any loadFont signal is send.

loadFont with arguments: (int) fontIndex, (string) fontFileName, (opetype.js font instance) font, (arraybuffer) fontArraybuffer

When the font file is loaded and opetype.js has parsed it. I.e. All the font data is now available.

allFontsLoaded with arguments: (int) countAllFonts

Won't be published if not all fonts could be loaded. There will be a warning in the console output in this case.

Runtime

Currently there is only one channel published to during runtime:

activateFont with arguments: (int) fontIndex

This is published by the FamilyChooser widget. Most of the widgets are subscribed to this signal, including FamilyChooser itself (that way many FamilyChooser widgets can coexist if needed).

Configuration Options

Most of the widgets are configurable via options. At the moment these options are used to make specimenTools blend into Material Design Lite, see the extensive configuration done in main.js of mdlFontSpecimen.

Most of the options define the CSS-Classes that are used in the widgets, either as markers, to control aspects of the marked DOM-Element or as CSS-Classes of newly created DOM elements. Some are callbacks/hooks e.g. to activate ui-elements of MDL.

The same widgets can be used with different sets of options, for this the "factory" array in the main function would be configured with different CSS-selection-classes and different options but the same widget constructors.

HowTos:

Regenerate the file lib/fontData/languageCharSets.json

Update the CLDR submodules cldr-localenames-modern and cldr-misc-modern.

$ git submodule update --recursive --remote

Then run this command to recreate the languageCharSets.json file:

$ ./build/makeChars2LanguageCoverageTable.js lib/fontData/languageCharSets.json