Typeface identification

[Ken Moffat]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 02:48:24PM +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
> 
> > As a sideline, I am working on a simple recognition/identity system
> > for faces based on the appearance of some letterforms — for example
> > the double-loop or fish-hook lowercase "g" — designed to let
> > beginners identify the typeface they want.
> Beginners usually lack the technical vocabulary to describe their
> difficulties, especially when English is not their native language, and they
> often use the only words they can think of, which sometimes leads to
> confusion.
> 

As a native English speaker, most of the details for how to describe
the variations in fonts are not common knowledge.  In the past I was
interested in trying to use TTF and OTF fonts to cover the main
languages I was[1] likely to find on the web (and a few less-common
variants).  In the end I went with the descriptions from wikipedia
when I could find them (and it is possible I misclassified some
fotns).

Those results are at http://zarniwhoop.uk/ttf-otf-notes.html
(now old, but very little now changes in unicode for the
subset of current languages found on the web).

Please note it is plain http://, also (if anyone accesses it) the
'Please send any comments to' should be disregarded - that address
no-longer gets to me.

Anyway - the TeX connection is that I used xelatex to produce the
PDFs of Glyphs and Languages.  For me, part of the interest was
"does it reliably cover what I encounter", part was "does it look
nice? (very subjective, my ideas of niceness are a million miles
away from Knuth's).  Oh, and for general creation of (non-TeX)
documents it helps to not have very many fonts (scrolling down
though several hundred when editing a paragraph to use a new font is
not fun).

> Unlike other classifications (Vox, especially) I am not trying to group the
> faces into categories, but to provide some features which can be used to
> locate a specific face.
> 
> (It was triggered by requests like "What's that typeface where the bar on
> the e is slanted and the capitals are lower than the ascenders and the f is
> so narrow you hardly need ff fl fi ffl ffi?")
> 
> As a test, I'm slowly working through the faces listed in the LaTeX Font
> Catalogue, building on the list of features as I go. So far:
> 
> a-form	hooked/round
> e-form	horixontal/sloped
> g-form	fish-hook/double-loop
> Ascenders	above/cap-height/below
> Serifs	bracketed/square/hairline
> R-form	straight/convex/concave/s-shape
> c-form	bulb/stroke
> 
> I am not trying to capture all design features, just those that are
> immediately explainable and visible to a beginner.
> 
> If anyone else has done this before, please scream now :-)
> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter Flynn
> Cork 🇮🇪 Ireland 🇪🇺

Sounds interesting.

ĸen

1. In those days it was easy to use google news to look at reports
from different countries.

-- 
git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are
homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.
                -- Isaac Wolkerstorfer