Typophile

Independent font information platforms

Andreas Stötzner

I wonder if there is any reliable independent platform around which gives comparative information about fonts in their possibly latest versions. I have in mind not so much a search like “free funny christmas fonts” but rather specialised requirements, e.g. in science.

Alan Wood’s Unicode resources have been rightfully much acknowledged in the past. But it seems to be heavily out of date, at least with its detailed font informations. No wonder, this is hardly a task to be solved forever by one single man.

What do you fellow typophiles make of Identifont?

Fontscape seems to offer a promising approach, yet the selections presented seem to be rather arbitrary – and very limited.

Wazu Japan’s page seems to have not been updated for some two years as well; however, it offers an interesting online font testing functionality.

An universal, comprehensive and detailed font information system – Utopian?

municate

I've actually been working on a concept for the better part of the last year as part of my undergraduate thesis... It is more of democratization of typographic data than a utopia...

David Berlow

The Recommendations portion of the proposed EPAR table is some of this. If you want more in that table, the public comment period is about to commence somewhere.

Cheers!

Don McCahill

> What do you fellow typophiles make of Identifont?

I have played with this in the past, and found it often took me into circles. I suspect that few in this forum need such a tool, as they can recognize most fonts through memory, or a quick glance through a type guide.

aluminum

Maybe related?

http://www.typedia.com

Andreas Stötzner

Typedia does look quite good. However, I would welcome a functionality that lets you search “find fonts which contain the U+10300 block” or “fonts with character U+2182”.
Maybe, I expect too much –.

nina

FileFormat.info seems to do a bit of that,* but doesn't feature a lot of fonts.

* http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/012f/fontsupport.htm
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/index.htm

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