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Very interesting work. I'm thinking it would be nice to add measures like this to FontConfig so that open source font libraries and widgets (on systems which us

Very interesting work. I'm thinking it would be nice to add measures like this to FontConfig so that open source font libraries and widgets (on systems which use FontConfig [Linux {including Android I think}, and GTK apps on Windows and Mac such as Inkscape]) can help users make more principled selections. Also, since FontConfig does indexing a) in native code and b) only at install time, more robustness could be built into these measures without runtime cost, including having a detector for fiercely unconventional fonts (like Libre Barcode or Wingdings) which would present basically garbage results with these metrics. I would make an adjustment to the measurement of weight, to make it the shaded proportion of the area within the outermost convex hull of the outline, rather than the shaded proportion of the bounding box. A way to accomplish this with o (without changing your technique completely) is to flood fill the outside with a third color, then measure the ratio of white to black. Then the next enhancement would of course be to figure out the logical mapping of these metrics to other scripts. Cyrillic (with Kha height instead of x-height, and о instead of o) is straightforward, Hangeul is harder, communist and republican Chinese characters readily break rules for text color when juxtaposed, Japanese has three writing systems to assess. As for the application, it would be nice to see the histograms update in relation to eachother (maybe with two toplines, one for the overall histogram, and one for the intersection of the other selected ranges), so I can see the clustering of the histogram when I select a certain weight range. Also, there seems to be a bug in the range filtering, since all of the results are outside the selected range for me.

florians 9y ago
Thanks for your detailed feedback. Your suggestion for measuring the weight more precisely is what I’d been thinking but didn’t figure out how to do it. Introducing a third color is such a simple way to do it! I’ll look into this. I will reconsider updating the histograms to reflect the current filtered subset. I tried this in the past but ended up with cases with very little results and thus small visible areas in the histograms that often required to reset filters. But I agree that this would better reflect the filtered data. Thank you.

florians 9y ago

Thanks for your detailed feedback. Your suggestion for measuring the weight more precisely is what I’d been thinking but didn’t figure out how to do it. Introducing a third color is such a simple way to do it! I’ll look into this. I will reconsider updating the histograms to reflect the current filtered subset. I tried this in the past but ended up with cases with very little results and thus small visible areas in the histograms that often required to reset filters. But I agree that this would better reflect the filtered data. Thank you.