Font Forum

When importing fonts, a list is shown that tells me how many duplicate and invalid resources have been encountered. What can I do with this information? MainType 4 doesn't let me search for duplicates or invalid fonts... I have several thousand fonts, should I check them one by one?

Cheers,
Jan

Enigma wrote:When importing fonts, a list is shown that tells me how many duplicate and invalid resources have been encountered. What can I do with this information? MainType 4 doesn't let me search for duplicates or invalid fonts... I have several thousand fonts, should I check them one by one?

Cheers,
Jan

At the moment you can't do much with this information. Invalid resources are fonts that do not comply with the TTF/OTF/Type-1 standards and they do not show up in MainType. Duplicate resources are 2 binary identical files of which you will only see 1 in MainType. A way remove duplicate resources will be added in a later version.

León

León Fridsma wrote:At the moment you can't do much with this information. Invalid resources are fonts that do not comply with the TTF/OTF/Type-1 standards and they do not show up in MainType. Duplicate resources are 2 binary identical files of which you will only see 1 in MainType.

Okay, thanks for explaining this.

León Fridsma wrote:A way remove duplicate resources will be added in a later version.

Fine. Does this include a way to show those fonts that are stored in the database/vault in several different versions (I mean version numbers)? Or did you mean just that?

Cheers,
Jan

Enigma wrote:Fine. Does this include a way to show those fonts that are stored in the database/vault in several different versions (I mean version numbers)? Or did you mean just that?

We are not sure yet, but we will most likely first add support for removing true duplicates (exact binary copies of the same font files). After that we might add another feature to remove similars.

Erwin Denissen wrote:After that we might add another feature to remove similars.

That would be great - I don't need five different versions of a font, and if you have more than a few hundred fonts, it's quite tedious to find duplicates by scrolling though the list of fonts.

For me it would be enough to check the names - no need to find optically similar fonts. That shouldn't be too complicated.

Cheers,
Jan

Enigma wrote:

Erwin Denissen wrote:After that we might add another feature to remove similars.

"For me it would be enough to check the names"
Cheers,
Jan

That would be disastrous! Lots of names have been re-used by very different fonts. Take Alien for example!
And "similars" can be very different and useful.

Exact dups that have been renamed are the major problem.

Dave Crosby wrote:That would be disastrous!

Well, no, it wouldn't. There could easily be several options for searching different kinds of duplicates so that everybody gets what he wants.

Dave Crosby wrote:And "similars" can be very different and useful.

I have many fonts in version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1 and so on. I really don't need the old versions - they mostly only contain less characters, that's all. And I'd like to get rid of them.

Dave Crosby wrote:Exact dups that have been renamed are the major problem.

Wasn't there a bigger font size? Please let your arguments speak for themselves.

Cheers,
Jan

Sorry to have offended you Jan, but it got your attention, didn't it.
Saving different fonts with the same name to the same folder has wiped out several of my favorite fonts and it took months to relocate the originals.
"Similar" means different things to different people. See Panose your Fonts. You will find LOTS of attention catchers there.

Dave Crosby wrote:Sorry to have offended you Jan, but it got your attention, didn't it.

Well, you didn't offend me, I just expressed a meaning that (slightly) differs from yours. And why did you want to get my attention?

Dave Crosby wrote:Saving different fonts with the same name to the same folder has wiped out several of my favorite fonts and it took months to relocate the originals.
"Similar" means different things to different people. See Panose your Fonts. You will find LOTS of attention catchers there.

I didn't say that what you mentioned doesn't make sense. It does. But why do you demand a duplicate search function that only matches your needs and ask High-Logic to dismiss my request? As I said, both features can easily coexist.

Cheers,
Jan

@ Jan, My problem is that I possibly have 5,000-10,000 dups that were stolen and re-named by others that I don't want in my collection. I don't want to push a button and lose years of collected fonts by accident.

From my point of view I was not asking "High-Logic to dismiss"your "request." I was just pointing out the possible pitfalls.