Very often a font house will honor a request for an EPS setting.

hhp

I just saw, a similar topic is discussed here: http://typophile.com/node/6313

Hrant,

Really?
Do you make a request via email justifying why and maybe mentioning other shortlisted faces. And they send you an EPS sample sheet?

Thats great.

I tend to receive the requests, not make them, since I design fonts and rarely touch the stuff myself. :-) The requests I get rarely mention other shortlisted fonts, for whatever reason. And I almost never decline; my philosophy is that the font scene is too competitive so the most one can hope for in the retail market is to hook people onto your product by letting them use it a little bit. By the same logic, I never cripple my live online samples, and I believe that any font house that does that probably isn't thinking straight.

hhp

I understand your dilemma, Jonny. Keep in mind:

nuisance backgrounds make them hard to work with for mocking up a design

FontShop's sample background was switched off in July. MyFonts and others also have none.

Do you make a request via email justifying why and maybe mentioning other shortlisted faces. And they send you an EPS sample sheet?

Yes. FontShop will do this within reason.

I have asked for sample settings in the form of pdfs from foundries.
Tim

So, speaking of font previews...

About an hour ago here at ATypI, Adam and Yuri previewed their soon-to-be updated BitFonter software. It started out as a showcase the new capabilities of the app, but slightly turned into a "be careful what you put on the web" lecture. In about 30 seconds they showed how you can take a bitmap image from MyFonts showing the character set of a typeface and basically auto generate a working font. Obviously there are numerous implication of this feature; surly there are many legitimate uses where this would be great. On the other hand, it might make designers/distributers think again about how they showcase their types.

r.k

It is a shame that good tools which have legitimate uses also make piracy more convenient and marketing by honest type houses more difficult :-(

ChrisL

As an inde typedesigner I try to meet every request in it's best way. It could be a set up of words as a pdf/eps. Sometimes my pdf-specimen will do the job of convinsing the client for a purchase. If a bigger and more complicated project needs a few"try-outs" that could be fixed as well. It vary a lot from case to case. I agree with Hrant you have to be customer friendly as much as possible in order to get new clients.

> MyFonts and others also have none.

Actually some font houses seem to have elected to maintain it at
MyFonts. I can't find it now, but I recently ran into such a case.

> In about 30 seconds they showed how you can take a bitmap
> image from MyFonts showing the character set of a typeface
> and basically auto generate a working font.

There's no way this can work on a "real" font.

hhp