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

[Rajeesh K Nambiar]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Mayank Jha <mayank25080562 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Read the document, but it lacks details. How is GPOS/GSUB completeness
measured? Same goes with Bearing, Kerning also. Can you share more
details?

>
> 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
>>
>>
>>



-- 
Cheers,
Rajeesh