Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Font Directories

Eldest Son told me that the printing programs he is learning lock out most fonts so that the user isn't swamped with pages upon pages of fonts. The "book" classifies them as text, dingbats, symbols, script, and a few other things.

That doesn't make any sense. I don't know enough about fonts to devise a scheme myself, but just from inspection you can make general categories. My untutored eye says there are blocky fonts, and shaded fonts, and fonts that are good for tiny print, and such like things. A given font may wind up in several different categories--which seems harmless.

Suppose one imposes a directory structure on the fonts, and uses links to insert them in multiple places as needed. For example, if you want to search alphabetically, there's a "B" directory that contains links to all the fonts with names that start with "B". If you want German Black Letter, there's a directory for German fonts, as a subdirectory of the NonEnglish directory. The icon for the directory has not one (as Windows uses now) but multiple images of the letter A illustrating some of the directory's contents: or from subdirectories if the directory contains nothing but subdirectories.

It'd take some work to devise the scheme and implement it, but searching that would be a lot easier than scrolling down a few hundred options.

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