Re: Grepping fonts for a specific glyph
On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:58:17 +0200
Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com> dijo:
>On 28 January 2010 16:40, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:05:42 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> Open OOo Writer and write down the symbol to test it against all the
>> fonts. If some fonts do not display the Aleph, then you know it is
>> not available for that font-family.
>That is fine for a one-time test, but I would like to automate this as
>it is something that I will be doing often in a new project that I am
>involved in.
I suggest Fontmatrix or FontForge. They cannot automate the task, but
at least if they say the font contains the glyph, then you know it's
really there. (See comment below for additional options.)
>> If the font has not available the symbol, it will display a "fallback
>> alternative" sign, this is a suggested standard feature of unicode
>> fonts.
>For instance, when I have Hebrew text but use a font that does not
>have Hebrew glyphs, I still see Hebrew letters. Obviously another font
>is being substituted.
OpenOffice is the wrong tool to find out if a font contains a glyph. As
you have discovered, OOo will substitute the glyph from another font,
and it won't tell you it has done so. As far as I know this is also
true for MS Office, KOffice and AbiWord. Apparently users find this
"feature" so useful that Apple included it in the operating system for
MacOS.
A better tool would be Scribus, in canvas view (not in Story Editor
view). I needed to do a similar task for glyphs required by the
International Phonetic Alphabet. I created a document where I typed all
the glyphs (about 60), then copied and pasted over and over. I set each
set to one of the fonts I was considering and then looked for holes. If
you line the sets up to look like a table it makes it easy to see the
results.
Reply to: