Typeface identification

[Peter Flynn]

On 26/04/2023 07:48, Andreas Scherer wrote:
> Peter,
> 
>  > I can't imagine what it must be like to be stuck with a graphical font
>  > selection tool that insists on using each font to render each entry in
>  > the drop-down menu, when you have several thousand fonts to pick from.
> 
> People are complaining: 
> https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/177870-we-need-flexible-font-categories

Vox and Vox-based systems do provide these categories, but until 
recently, the Vox ecosystem was used (and managed?) by Atypi. I don't 
know what the position is since they stopped using it. The problem isn't 
a shortage of candidate ontologies but which one to choose from, because 
switching to another one afterwards is probably expensive.

> (At least on macOS, Affinity users can resort to font categories that 
> they can define in the system font management tool. Inkscape 1.3 seems 
> to bring a similar approach on all platforms.)

The implementation of collections is a step in the right direction. The 
big problem is that the categorisation is a human job because the 
metadata provided by the font-file creators is often very poor (and 
there isn't much provision to store it). For example, how would you go 
about listing all the sans-serif fonts you have installed, having access 
only to the font files themselves? AFAIK the only indication *might* be 
in the font name or the file name; but Raleway (for example) has no 
indication that I can find that it is a sans-serif typeface.

Peter