FontInstead is online

Adriano Di Giovanni14 Oct 2010

I want to share with you a tool I developed to help us designers choosing fonts for our css stacks that are similar in aspect values and alphabet widths for a given font size.

The tool, FontInstead, can gather metrics of the fonts you have installed on your computer and give you statistics about gathered font metrics.

Please, visit http://adrianodigiovanni.com/fontinstead to let FontInstead analyze your fonts and grow the list.

FontInstead is a beta project. I would appreciate comments, suggestions, bug reports.

Thanks in advance,
Adriano

Frode Bo Helland14 Oct 2010#

Adriano, I find this very interesting. Especially the alphabet length. (I’m guessing that’s pixels.) You should remember that it will vary with different rendering engines. Edit: x-height ratio makes a lot of sense!

Adriano Di Giovanni14 Oct 2010#

Frode,
I'm happy you appreciate FontInstead.
You're right, alphabet width values are about pixels.
I know font metrics are rendering engine related and I should stress on FontInstead pages that value have relative meaning only. So, thanks for your suggestion.
What do you mean by "Edit: "?

Thanks again,
Adriano

Frode Bo Helland14 Oct 2010#

I wrote something different the first time, and edited my post.

riccard014 Oct 2010#

Nice! :-)
The "storing" part is a little slow (and unsettling in wording ;-). Especially since the system don't remember it if one goes back to the page.
Also, it's not clear exactly what is calculated as "alphabet length" (and it gives 0 for some CJK fonts).

Adriano Di Giovanni14 Oct 2010#

Riccardo,
thanks for your comment and suggestions. I'm going to collect all of them and improve FontInstead.

Thanks again,
Adriano

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