Export/Import tags/ratings...is there any real-world use case?

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nabsltd
Posts: 132
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2016 12:35 am

Export/Import tags/ratings...is there any real-world use case?

Post by nabsltd »

Although the manual says that exporting and importing tags can be used to share this data among computers, the reality is that a single user with multiple computers is better off just doing a backup of the database and restoring to the other computers. This has many advantages, including copying much more that a single user might like to keep (views, layouts, etc.), and it also means the fonts don't even have to be available on the file system of the other computer (since they are stored in the backup).

For sharing tags with other users of MainType, first you have to assume that the other people tag the same way you do. Even if that is the case, you can't share unless the other users have the exact same version of the font file that you have. This means they might even have to have purchased it from the same site (as some sites add extra metadata to the font information that changes the font resource as far as MainType is concerned), and at around the same time (because the designer might make changes and upload them to the vendor site).

I think this feature would be much more useful if the export included more than just the hash of the font resource, so that a more fuzzy match can be made. The Full Font Name (or Family Name plus Subfamily), the Width, Weight, and Bold/Italic flags, plus the Vendor ID should allow a match to a different version of the same font without matching incorrectly too often. Then, on the import, have an "enable fuzzy match" checkbox to allow this to be done if an exact match of the hash doesn't exist.

Last, to make sure that mistakes don't get made that can't be undone, if "fuzzy match" is selected, then all fonts that got changed on the import should get auto-tagged with either a user-defined tag in the import dialog, or MainType should set one that is very unlikely to collide with user tags (e.g., ImportFuzzyMatch). Then, the user can easily review the changed fonts.
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