[Student-projects] Web interface for FontCompare and Harfbuzz rendering tests.

Mon Mar 17 07:03:54 PDT 2014

Standard set of parameters, refer to, Glyph Consistency, GPOS/GSUB
completeness, Appropriate bearing, Kerning , Weight in Bold, Italic and
Underline, Sentence similarity etc. These set of standards are currently
nothing but a set of paramters extracted from well known beautiful font,
say Lohit.ttf for Devanagri script. The exact details are given
here<https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/blob/master/pycontrib/FontCompare/DOC.txt>.

The need for a web interface is inevitable because a standalone testing
tool, does not give you real user feedbacks. This tool however would
integrate the user feedback as a metadata in the database which would be
used as information to test upon the aesthetics since it is a matter of
both subjective (user feedback) and objective (set of standards) concern.

Yes Currently the tool, supports only Devanagari script, which I know very
well. Adding support for other scripts requires consultation with font
experts of other languages, so I could not add those.

This web tool aims at being two-way medium between font users and font
developers unlike anything we have currently.

However I did not get what you tried to say when you said "values provided
by the tool is trivial and obvious.".

Cheers!

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Santhosh Thottingal <
santhosh.thottingal at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Mayank,
>
>
> *Short Description:*
>> I am wanting to make a web interface for a font aesthetics analyzer for
>> Indic scripts, FontCompare. FontCompare is a plugin for fontforge, which
>> provides assistance to the font developers in assessing the aesthetics of a
>> font, based on the standard set of parameters and their values.
>>
>
> Could you please give more details about "standard set of parameters?".
> How it is collected? How much confidence we can have on those parameters?
> What is the script coverage?
>
>
>> It uses the python scripting extension of fontforge. However it currently
>> it has very basic features implemented. I plan to add in advanced tests,
>> and also building a web interface for the same.
>>
>
> Why you need a web interface if it works as fontforge plugin and also as
> standalone python application?
> If it is available as fontforge plugin, that is the best way to use it -
> close to the font developer tool.
>
>
>> In general it would be a real help, and it would eliminate the dearth of
>> good quality open type fonts for Indic scripts, which was the main motive
>> of behind FontCompare. By making a web interface this would indirectly
>> propel the creation, of good quality stylish fonts for Indic scripts, which
>> is limited to 2-3 per language as of now!
>>
>
> Depends on the answer to my first question :)
> I tried the application with multiple fonts and I get 0 as the score for
> Meera font. I Imagine Malayalam is not supported. I tried Lohit Bengali and
> some other fonts too. I get the following error
>
>  Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "fontcompare", line 72, in BeginTest
>     self.TestFromFont()
>   File "fontcompare", line 174, in TestFromFont
>     score = gc.glyph_round_consistency(fontA, self.GetScript(),100)
>   File "/tmp/FontCompare/fc/GlyphConsistency.py", line 109, in
> glyph_round_consistency
>     return (set_round_score/float(total))*10
> ZeroDivisionError: float division by zero
>
> and
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "fontcompare", line 72, in BeginTest
>     self.TestFromFont()
>   File "fontcompare", line 214, in TestFromFont
>     self.highresScoreBar.setValue(round(score/10))
> TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for /: 'NoneType' and 'int'
>
>
>> *Synopsis:*
>> The web interface would be having two main parts, one is the User
>> feedback area, and the other being the Font Developers testing area. The
>> interface would thus serve dual purpose, of conveying the feedback of the
>> font users to the font devs, and a testing platform for the font developers
>> to test out their fonts based on the set of standard tests performed by the
>> FontCompare application based on set of standards.
>>
>
> So is this is going to be a web page where users can download, try some
> sample text with varying size, bold, italic variants etc? Something like
> google webfonts interface?
>
> Whether font developers prefer a web application for measuring the
> aesthetic parameters again depends on my answer to first question.  Talking
> about aesthetic parameters, being it a mix of subjective and measurable
> variables,  I would say the parameters are hardly match my expectations
> about a language I know relatively well - Malayalam. If a user is font
> designer with basic design knowledge, the values provided by the tool is
> trivial and obvious. The choice of some measures - like LBearing/RBearing,
> ascent/descent rations etc are very crucial and it is an informed choice by
> font developers.
>
> (I am not discouraging you here, but I am trying to set the expectations
> right and if possible try to help you to improve your ideas further.)
>
>
>
>>
>> * Implementation Details:*
>> I would be using Django as the web framework, for making the web
>> interface alongwith JS/jQuery/BootstrapCSS for styling purpose.
>>
>> User feedback region:
>> This would allow the user to test out new fonts of any language with his
>> custom text. Since this would be difficult to do realtime, so we have to
>> render the text in the said font on the server side and then push it on the
>> client, this can be easily done with any fontrendering tool. Preferably
>> harfbuzz,
>>
>
> There are lot of websites that does this using CSS3 webfont technology.
> There is even a bookmarklet tool that allows you to drag a font to any site
> and see that site with that font.(
> http://somadesign.ca/projects/fontfriend/)
>
> Silpa project plans to provide a webfont interface to choose indic fonts
> based on similar user experience. The old silpa application had this
> interface.
>
> Thanks
> Santhosh
>
>
>
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>

-- 
Mayank Jha
http://mjnovice.wordpress.com/
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