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Scosh / fonts

A collection of rad, open-source typefaces that everyone needs in their lives.
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Previews required! / Project Direction Discussion #2

Open nmaxcom opened 5 years ago

nmaxcom commented 5 years ago

Hi, thank you for what you are doing.

I think this repo needs screencaps of each font it has, it's imperative. Otherwise, what's the workflow? Check one by one?

I don't know if you are still active on this, but I might give you some of my time to make this better.

Scosh commented 5 years ago

Hey!

I’m sorry I took so long to get back to you on this; I’ve been very busy with uni and other duties this year, so this and my other hobby projects have kind of taken a backseat.

thank you for what you are doing.

I’m so happy you and a surprising handful of people seem to really appreciate this project! It makes me sadder still that I can’t justify putting more time into this project right now, but what I’m going to do here is both answer your original issue question and go into further detail about my current ideas for anyone who is interested in picking up where I left off.

I think this repo needs screencaps of each font it has, it's imperative.

Yes, I absolutely agree. Previews for the fonts has been on my bucket list of features for a very long time now. I’ve also had numerous IRL conversations with computer science friends about how one might best go about generating either image or HTML previews for each font.

My first idea was to use an Inkscape template and find a way to write a script that would fill text fields and change the font. If you navigate to this file in the repository you can still see my mockup of what that was supposed to look like. The appearance was very much inspired by how FontSquirrel lays out glyph previews.

I still like the look of the mockup, but the Inkscape replacement script idea is probably too cumbersome.

Other, later ideas included creating and filling the template using Processing or Python. I think either of these methods is much more viable. A friend already had the beginning of a Python script going that could create PNGs with a very basic preview of the font.

Instead of baked images, there is of course also the possibility of generating a website that would preview the contents of this repository. There’s a project that basically does this called fontain. I personally would like more detailed/expansive font previews that show common glyphs, but it’s a cool project and perhaps there’s even the possibility of forking that and creating something new from there …

I think a web preview would actually be the more user friendly way to go about it, but it’s much more complicated than going the image-generating route.

nmaxcom commented 5 years ago

I’m sorry I took so long to get back to you on this; I’ve been very busy with uni and other duties this year, so this and my other hobby projects have kind of taken a backseat.

I can appreciate the problem. As a matter of fact, I should steer clear of dedicating more time to OSS about until 2046 approximately 😂 But sometimes you see something that grabs your attention and want to give your push.

I'm a NodeJS fan, and there are a few "easy" routes that could be contemplated like fontkit and text2png

But, facing the reality of both our lack of time, I'd just go the fontain route. I could just write a script to generate all the @font-face automatically, give it a simple, nice CSS and some JS functionality (no frameworks needed) and make it public through GitHub Pages.

The fonts could be classified as you have them here, people would be able to preview them, do a "test drive" and download the font if they wish.