http://fontbureau.com -- pretty sure they have what you need, samples that is.

http://www.garagefonts.com has theirs online. It's a couple of years old, but shows a ton of fonts.

Doesn't Storm also have all his specimens online in PDF?

Fontworks UK has some nice PDF versions of their FontBox.

you guys rokk! thanks so much, the instant feedback kicks butt!

timmy

Looking at my PDFs, it looks like Storm, PsyOps, Underware, and MindCandy all have PDF Specimens.

I LOVE PDF specimens... the best way to show fonts online, and they are printable! I in fact collect PDF specimens...

So what are some of your favorites?

hhp

Don't forget Helzel and his herd of blackletters.

I'm sorry, I thought this thread was about PDF specimens. It appears to be about What Hrant Has To Say About Yanks. My mistake.

One way of strengthening PDF security is to use Type->Create Outlines or similar. A cracker can still blow away time re-importing them into a font editor and adding the metrics on his own, but the amount of time needed to reconstruct such a font adequately will usually be worth more in an adequately skilled person's dollars than the cost of simply buying a license. The downside of Create Outlines is that there is no hinting. Supposedly the newer versions of Acrobat will anti-alias line art. I'll try making some comparisons this weekend or so.

PDF specimens are a lovely idea, but the security for embedded fonts is too weak for my liking. Extracted fonts lack hinting and kerning, so are probably too much trouble for people wanting to pirate text faces, but the opportunity to strip a display face from a PDF and, within a few minutes, have a working version with which to create a headline or web graphic is more temptation than I would like to put before a lot of people.

> the security for embedded fonts is too weak for my liking.

But so many big houses use PDF now, like FontBureau and Adobe.

From the few tests I've done recently (don't ask me how to do it - I won't tell) it seems that -especially with more recently generated PDFs- it only works some of the time, and even then you rarely get anything really usable.

hhp

>PDF specimens are a lovely idea, but the security for embedded fonts is too weak for my liking.

What would you suggest as an alternative, John?

I think Jeremy Tankyard's website has PDFs, but he converted all the fonts to outlines, so it will print well. He compensates the lack of crispness in the PDFs by having a online test-driver (which isn't fully piracy-proof either afaik).
That's the best alternative i've seen around.

Department stores could probably eliminate shoplifting if they kept all their inventory in a vault and only let customers see pictures of merchandise. And yet they don't because they'd lose more business than the losses they'd eliminate.

I think PDF specimens are a good idea. The risk of extraction is pretty small, especially since you end up with something less than the real font. Selling a font is much riskier. Once it's out in the world, anything can happen.

www.typotheque.com/pages/PDF_samples.html
www.dutchtypelibrary.nl/PDF.html

I'm generally glad to send some pdf when people ask me directly or doing font testing with their layout and my fonts. But I

Re: create outlines command and huge file sizes... I've not upgraded to Acrobat 6 yet; I'd be curious to see if the OT FDK's outline subroutinization code might have been repurposed for general PS outlines in Acrobat. That might make no-font specimens more feasible.

My arse.

[ With the aim of keeping things on topic, the political posts here
have been moved to The War, Politics, Et cetera ]