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Filter Fonts by Character Set

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 7:13 pm
by Fred Goldman
First let me say, just like FontCreator, MainType is a superb program for a reasonable price, thank you.

I work almost exclusively with Hebrew. It would be real nice if there was a way to sort the fonts so that all fonts that have a Hebrew character set would be sorted together.

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 8:35 pm
by Erwin Denissen
Hi Fred,

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add it to the to-do list. What is your definition of a Hebrew character set? How about other "character sets", like Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc?

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 8:52 pm
by Fred Goldman
Definitely, my suggestion is not limited to Hebrew. It was just an example.

What I mean by character sets is in the characters pane there is a drop down where you can choose Basic Latin, Greek & Croptic, Hebrew, etc. I would like to be able to sort the fonts by which have which sets. For example put first all that have Basic Latin. Of course almost every font has a Basic Latin set so I don't know how useful that would be, but for Hebrew, Arabic, and many other languages it would make it much easier to see all the fonts that have that particualr character set.

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 9:37 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
I wonder if this would work better as a filter rather than a column sort order?

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 9:38 pm
by Erwin Denissen
So you would like to filter fonts based on the availability of characters in specific Unicode Blocks. That will keep MainType busy for a while, but I sure like that enhancement.

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 9:56 pm
by Fred Goldman
Yes, a filter would be great! (Not quite as easy as just clicking the tab in the Fonts pane, but that's OK).

When you say it would keep MainType busy, do you mean it would take a lot of time to process that kind of a filter?

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 10:02 pm
by Fred Goldman
I see now why a filter would make more sense. Sorting doesn't exclude any fonts, whereas a filter only displays certain fonts. In this case I want to exclude all fonts that don't have a certain character set, so a filter would be proper.

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 10:32 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
The information is already displayed by MainType. The problem is deciding how many characters a character set needs to have before it is deemed to be supported by the font. Here's the information for Gentium:
Basic Latin (95 of 128)
Latin-1 Supplement (96 of 128)
Latin Extended-A (128 of 128)
Latin Extended-B (178 of 208)
IPA Extensions (94 of 96)
Spacing Modifier Letters (56 of 80)
Combining Diacritical Marks (82 of 112)
Greek and Coptic (82 of 127)
Cyrillic (80 of 255)
Cyrillic Supplement (1 of 20)
Latin Extended Additional (246 of 246)
Greek Extended (233 of 233)
General Punctuation (39 of 106)
Superscripts and Subscripts (28 of 34)
Currency Symbols (14 of 22)
Letterlike Symbols (1 of 79)
Mathematical Operators (2 of 256)
Private Use Area (9 of 6400)
Alphabetic Presentation Forms (5 of 58 )
If the user selected a filter to display only fonts including Mathematical Operators, should this font be shown or hidden?

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 10:48 pm
by Fred Goldman
That's a good point. Maybe an option for a minimum amount of characters would be good. For example only fonts that have at least five mathematical characters etc.

Sorting

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 9:54 pm
by Dave Crosby
Another possibility would be to specify a PANOSE number or range of numbers for your chosen fonts.