[OpenFontLibrary] An index for OFL fonts

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Peter Baker wrote:
> I've been lurking on this list for a while, never posted here before.
> Hi everyone!
> 
> A couple of weeks ago, in response to a query on the XeTeX list, I
> wrote a little Python/FontForge script (called "fontswith") that
> searches through a directory (with all its subdirectories) looking for
> fonts with a specific set of glyphs. Turns out that this is a common
> sort of need, and various people have produced home-rolled solutions
> (Perl scripts, PHP scripts ...). Mine has a number of friendly
> command-line switches, can search ttf, otf, ttc, pfb and pfa fonts,
> and can speed searches by building an index for future use.

Hi Peter,

Thanks a lot for creating and releasing such an incredibly useful utility!

Previously I used this tiny script (which allows for some visual
comparison): http://utilities.open-fonts.org/compfont
and fontaine's coverage info:
http://unifont.org/fontaine/

(BTW attacking the problem from another angle: Martin Hosken also wrote
a little utility using his very capable fonts:TTF module to compare a
text corpus against coverage of existing fonts and report missing
codepoints).

> A little while after Iwan Gabovitch posted the link to an archive of
> OFL fonts it suddenly occurred to me that one didn't actually have to
> have fonts installed or even present on the system in order to search;
> one just had to have the index. So I've made an index for the OFL and
> posted it along with my script, here:
> 
> http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/fontswith/
> 
> There's only one hitch, namely that several of the fonts in the
> archive are inaccessible for some reason: instead of the font, I have
> a 14-byte text file containing just the phrase "file not found." These
> are the fonts in question:
> 
> OFL-OSP_-_NotCourier-sans.ttf
> OFL-OSP_-_NotCourier-sans_1.ttf

The nice OSP folks can probably provide us with this one separately if
needed.

> OFL-PhaistosDisk_-_Layne_Rook.ttf
> PD-chemoelectric_-_Goudy_Bookletter_1.otf

Seems there's an upstream page here:
http://home.comcast.net/~crudfactory/cf3/gb1911.xhtml

> PD-Daniel_J_-_Rahel.otf
> 
> I suppose there's some easy fix for this; 

Yes hopefully these can become accessible for review again.

> but in the meantime I hope
> folks will enjoy having a simple way to discover which OFL fonts have
> glyphs that answer some particular need.

Thanks for providing that service.


IIRC Dave's presentation of the features of the OFLB at the last LGM had
a nice php frontend with jquery and fontaine magic underneath to report
interactively on the coverage of a font, a font covering part of the
Turkish writing systems was used as an example I think.


> Best wishes,
> Peter Baker

Cheers,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org