Hello Johannes,
Johannes Hüsing wrote:
Leonard Mada <lmada_at_gmx.net> [Sun, May 04, 2008 at 07:26:04PM CEST]:
> Dear list members,
>
> Every "modern" OS comes with dozens of useless fonts, so that the
> current font drop-down list in most programs is overcrowded with fonts
> one never will use. Selecting a useful font becomes a nightmare.
>
> In an attempt to ease the selection of useful fonts, I began looking
> into sorting fonts using some statistical techniques. I summed my ideas
> on the OpenOffice.org wiki:
>
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/ToDo/Product/Font_Categories
>
> Of course, there is NO guarantee that something useful will emerge, but
> at least someone has tried it.
>
Why is there nothing mentioned with respect to the classical font
categorization, Venetian, Aldine, Transitional, Modern, Slab Serif, ... ?
I played with the idea over and over again, but decided then against it.
I had a look both on the Adobe site, and on various other sites (e.g.
http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/type_basics/type_families.htm#oldstyle).Unfortunately,
fonts belonging to different families may look very similar, while fonts
within one family are different enough to warrant a distinct
classification. Especially this latter aspect makes me think that the
font families are not that helpful, and - when choosing the appropriate
font - I do NOT want to limit myself to one family. A different font
family might look even better.
Also, I cannot remember a single time I have used a font based on its
family. Rather, a font gets selected based on how it looks within a
specific document (well, mostly it gets selected because the person
knows it - but lets ignore this and adopt a more scientific approach).
Selecting some measures, like font width, height, weight, complexity,
compactness, slant, [...] seems a sensible approach.
[...]
> - maybe some other measures
If you can obtain the *.afm information of the font, you have some
useful parameters such as cap height, ascender height, descender
height, oblique angle ...
I do have a rather limited understanding of the font-files proper. If I
am correct, .afm-files are available only for post-script fonts. Of
course, on Windows, most fonts will be TrueType and OpenType. I have no
idea, IF such information is available for these fonts.
My primary problem is however, that the purpose of this analysis is to
let end-users perform this same analysis on their computers on their own
font sets. My plan was to do a proof of concept analysis in R, and later
(when I have some better idea how to categorise fonts and everything
works fine) to post such a feature request in specific programs.
At this point, this sorting of fonts is of unproven benefit and of
unknown behaviour. So, I wouldn't want to waste developers time into
something that might prove useless (though I have high expectations that
something useful will emerge - NOT sure however which of the specific
measures will bring the most differentiating features).
I still hope in completing succefully this task.
Many thanks for your advice, I will take another look at afm-files.
Sincerely,
Leonard
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
