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.
I would like to try various statistical methods using R, unfortunately,
I got rather stuck in my attempts.
I wish to compute:
- the length of a standard string for the various fonts
- the weight
- some variance-type measures for the OX and OY-axis
- DCT (possibly analysing separately the low/high-frequencies)
- maybe some other measures
[I am open to suggestions]
1.) First and foremost, I need the list of fonts installed on my system.
[I am using Win2k]
Is there any way to get it automatically in R?
IF this is not possible, I could create one by hand, though this is
cumbersome, but the 2nd problem is more severe.
2.) How do I create/get the 2D-pixel matrix?
I need of course the f(x,y)-image representation for a standard text.
The following seems a rather ugly hack and I do not actually have the
exact text-box size.
> png(file="mytestfontimage.png")
> plot.new()
> title("This is a font")
> dev.off()
strwidth() and strheight() seem to be able to look into the fonts. But
how do I get the pixels?
And more importantly, can I get also the exact pixel-matrix?
[Though, it seems there are no pixel-units in strheight()/width(), but I
might be wrong on this.]
3.) The image-analyses capabilities of R are rather limited.
I couldn't find any reference to a DCT transform (or other techniques).
A search yielded only the following thread:
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/06/01/19615.html
As I do not know (and have access to) mathlab, I am rather confined to
R. Which is not bad, but I need a lot of help to accomplish this task.
Any help is highly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Leonard Mada
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, ... ? [...]> - maybe some other measuresIf you can obtain the *.afm information of the font, you have some useful parameters such as cap height, ascender height, descender height, oblique angle ... -- Johannes H?sing There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture mailto:johannes at huesing.name from such a trifling investment of fact. http://derwisch.wikidot.com (Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi")
Hello Johannes, Johannes H?sing 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