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Font Resources

Peter Martin, 2007-05-14; 8490 reads

Contents of this webpage

    Choosing a font
    SIL fonts
    Fonts at other sites
    Font Inspection and Management Tools
    Font Development Tools
    Page History

Choosing a font

Are there fonts available that will work for you? Albert Bickford, Jim Brase and Lorna Priest, 2007-05-11; 12665 reads
This article helps you know what to consider when looking for fonts to meet your Unicode needs.

SIL fonts

SIL Fonts for downloading NRSI Staff, 2013-04-08; 156137 reads
An index of all the fonts that are available from this site.

Fonts at other sites

See Finding Fonts on ScriptSource

Font Inspection and Management Tools

Find Glyph — a small, quick, and simple utility that allows you to find out which installed fonts have the Unicode point you are looking for.

Font properties extension — This Windows extension adds several new property tabs to the font properties dialog. These include information relating to font origination and copyright, embedding permissions, the type sizes to which hinting and smoothing are applied, and the code pages, Unicode ranges, and complex scripts supported by the font.

Microsoft Windows Font Properties Editor — Microsoft's free Font Properties Editor lets Windows users modify some of the text entries stored within TrueType and OpenType fonts. The editor gives type designers access to the following entries.

designer, designer link,
type foundry, foundry link,
description,
license, license link,
vendor ID.

The editor also allows embedding permissions to be made more restrictive.

Adobe Type Manager "Font management made easy... Organize your PostScript® Type 1, OpenType®, and TrueType fonts to suit the way you work with Adobe® Type Manager® (ATM) Deluxe."

Adobe Type Manager Light "Free font utility for viewing and printing PostScript fonts... Adobe® Type Manager® (ATM) Light is a system software component that automatically generates high-quality screen font bitmaps from the PostScript® outlines in Type 1 or OpenType® format."

BabelMap BabelMap is a free Windows character map utility that allows you to specify a font, and so can be used to see the encoded glyphs in a font.

Bitstream Font Reserve "Font Management for the Macintosh or Windows... Font Reserve effectively manages thousands of fonts. Activate, view, sort, and copy fonts quickly and efficiently."

FontExpert “Previews, prints and manages PostScript, TrueType, OpenType and raster fonts. Detects and solves problems with fonts and font substitutions.”

SIL ViewGlyph ViewGlyph allows you to see a font's contents from different perspectives: Unicode, a particular codepage, or the raw glyph palette. It also allows you to view the name and cmap tables, and to see various font metrics.

TrueType Explorer “TTE is a font tool for searching and exploring TrueType fonts. TTE works with fonts installed on your computer. TTE also works with fonts that are not installed on your computer, which may reside on your computer's drives (hard disk, CD-ROM, network, etc). TrueType fonts of any size or quantity--installed or not--are available for you to search and explore with TTE.”

UniSearch for Fonts “Unicode Search is a Windows program which runs on Win2000 and XP. The program is designed to explore your Fonts Folder to discover those fonts which have selected Unicode Blocks.”

Font Playground — a useful resource to test the rendering of many of these open fonts directly in your browser.

Font Development Tools

Tip

See Font Development Tools from SIL for a list of font development tools just from SIL.

Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType “The goal of the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType package is to share the tools used by Adobe font developers for wrapping up PostScript® fonts as OpenType/CFF font files, and adding OpenType layout features.”

Apple Font Tools for OS X Apple's suite of command-line font tools for OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). Includes tools for testing and modifying many aspects of TrueType fonts, including both standard and AAT font tables. Available as an OS X installer package including both tools and documentation.

Font Creator A shareware type design tool from High Logic.

FontForge (formerly called PfaEdit) “An outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another.”

FontLab FontLab produces a selection of type design tools and font utilities. Their flagship product, FontLab, is becoming the primary tool of choice for many professional type designers. Their TypeTool product is an entry-level type-design tool targeted toward non-professionals.

Fontographer Fontographer has been a popular type-design tool for a long time, and has recently seen its first release in many years. It remains second in usefulness to FontLab, though some still like the Fontographer way of doing things.

Microsoft tools and links Links to font specifications and technical references, Microsoft-provided tools (Font Validator, VOLT, OTLS, VTT, Signing tool, etc.), and other developer links.

SIL Reprise — font conversion utility Bob Hallissy, 2009-09-07; 18003 reads
Reprise is a utility to convert legacy-encoded fonts into Unicode fonts so they can be used in Unicode-based applications.

SIL TypeTuner Alan Ward, 2008-10-26; 21332 reads
TypeTuner can change the default glyphs, line metrics, and behaviors in specially prepared fonts.

FontUtils Martin Hosken, Bob Hallissy, Alan Ward, David Raymond, 2012-08-29; 25095 reads
The FontUtils package provides a plethora of command line tools for manipulating TrueType fonts. These tools are essential to NRSI's font development processes.

OS/2 table Range bit calculation workbook Bob Hallissy, 2008-02-06; 11171 reads
This Excel workbook (with included macros) calculates the UnicodeRange and CodepageRange bit vectors for the OS/2 table in TrueType fonts. The resultant hex string is directly usable in the FontUtils and Reprise utilities.

TTF_Edit A command-line tool that supports editing of various TrueType font tables.

TTX/FontTools TTX is a tool to convert OpenType and TrueType fonts to and from XML. FontTools is a library for manipulating fonts, written in Python. It supports TrueType, OpenType, AFM and to an extent Type 1 and some Mac-specific formats. OpenSource (BSD License). Binaries for Windows and Mac available.

Page History

2007-05-14 LP: added link to Are there fonts available that will work for you?

2005-11-28 LP: added Kannada

2005-02-14 LP: added http://www.travelphrases.info/fonts.html

2004-10-28 LP: added some fonts

2004-05-12 pkm: Replaced previous content (random listing of all our font pages) with a link to our downloads index, and a section for other sites.

Backlinks (20 most popular; affiliated sites and popular search engines removed)
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http://desktoppub.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iden...

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Reply
"Linc Madison", Sun, Feb 28, 2010 18:01 (CST)
Updated URL for Apple Font Tools

The URL given above for Apple Font Tools has changed. The new URL is <http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/Fonttools/Index.html>

Reply
martinpk, Mon, Mar 15, 2010 11:33 (CDT)
Re: Updated URL for Apple Font Tools

Changed now — thanks!

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