fontfahnder · the mission

This site is a spin-off from Jörg Petri's research project »Klassenlose Schrift«. It aims to develop a methodology to automatically retrieve typographically relevant data from digital font files. Our mission is to develop methods to gather data, have it validated, analysed, tested and make it available to the typographical community. The main assumption of the project is that macrotypographical data can be mined from the font files. We would like to show that this data is highly relevant for typographical design, and can foster typographical quality in practise and research. We assume that each font leaves an individual fingerprint that could later be used in different contexts as typesetting, font selection, classification, comparison or identification.

The site is currently an early beta version and was introduced only to a small group of typophiles so far.

Methodology and definitions

We call out method the KALI-method. This firstly relates to Kamp-Linfort, where our faculty is located and secondly to the godess Kali, who we interpret as powerful, ambiguous and dangerous (e.g. to Indiana Jones), just like our number are. In general we trust our numbers, and are able to reproduce them. We would like to point out though that they are due to rounding and other numerical effects, so at least the last digit should be not be interpreted too seriously.

Greyscale: This value represents the amount of coloured (foreground, inked, black) surface in relation to not-coloured surface (background, not-inked, white). It is measured in relation to the font size, in a long line of 10 pt text. Greyscale is measured in percent and represents the coloured part of the type-area. Higher numbers indicate darker fonts.

Width: The width currently reflects the running length of a 10 pt text (or a text of 1.6 mm x-height, if selected) of the german novel »Die Verwandlung« by Franz Kafka, measured in mm. High numbers indicate fonts using more horizontal space. The average running length is between 19,000 and 20,000 mm (20 m, approx. 787,4 inch) of text. The text-file used for rendering is 120.936 characters long. We are currently working on rendering the english translation, »The Metamorphosis«. Width is dependent to the font size used, while the geometry within different fonts differs. Therefore, width is calculated relative to either font size or x-height, which better represents the visual size of a font. We are currently working on a comparison based on cap-height.

Cap Height: The relative size of a capital letter to the fontsize. Cap-height is represented by a factor between 0 and 1. Here, 1 would mean that the capital H takes the occupies the complete height of the fontsize. A value of 0.75 means that in font using 1000 units of vertical size, the letter H is 750 units high.

x/cap ratio: The relation of x-height to cap-height, a factor between 0 and 1. Mind that this ratio is a fraction of a fraction, as the cap-height is measured relative to the fontsize. Here, 1 would represent a font with x-height identical to cap height.

All values were evaluated and compared to measurements in contemporary design software, as Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Though not completely identical, the data has so far proven to be reliable.

Font repository

Fontfahnder uses a repository of fonts from different sources. Most relevant source are the licenses acquired in recent years, from foundries as:

Cape Arcona Type Foundry
Feliciano Type Foundry
FontShop
Linotype
Strom Type Foundry
Type Together

Additionally, we used a selection of fonts from repositories that freely available. e.g. through google fonts. We also analysed a selection of fonts that ship with the operating systems we use (you may guess those).

Technology

We are using several rendering and image-analysis frameworks, namely (but not limited to) ImageMagick, Freetype, Python, bash-scripts. The website strongly relies on cunning technologies to tweak performance, we are using jQuery, jQuery UI, PubSubJS and D3.js. Please note that in the current version, not all browsers support all functions yet.

Browser support

This project is a constant construction site. We do not willingly support or ignore specific browsers or technologies. The current version seems to perform better on Chrome and Firefox though; Safari sometimes laggs and becomes unresponsive. We hope to find solutions for this issue in future versions.

Contact

Do not hesitate to contact us. We are keen on collaborating and contributing to typographic quality by automated font analysis. Mail to joerg.petri@hochschule-rhein-waal.de

Fontfahnder project by Jörg Petri
Programming and web-dev by Sven Nehls
Visualisation and data validation by Oktay Sönmez

The project was funded by the Seed-fund of the Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences