FontDrop! Subpages
The FontDrop! website began as a simple and user-friendly web application for examining and displaying the content of font files. Over time, several subpages were added, offering specific detailed views or more in-depth investigations. These subpages are described here.
Advance Width Report
A special page that sorts the characters of a script according to their width. Predefined groups of characters are sorted, such as lowercase and uppercase Latin or Greek letters, numbers, or punctuation marks. The purpose of this page is to provide a more detailed insight into the design of a typeface.
Setting tolerance: Add a tolerance factor. Values are then grouped not just by their value, but by their value plus the tolerance. Sometimes the letter widths vary by only a few units, e.g., due to interpolation. This can be compensated for by the tolerance factor.
Additional characters: Add your own characters to the sorted list if they are not in one of the predefined groups. Note that this only works with Unicode characters that are also present in the stored font.
Vertical Metrics Report
The vertical metrics of a font influence how the text lines are displayed in an application. There are various values and settings, and these are used depending on the application. Web browsers also sometimes have their own strategies for handling these values. For type producers, these values are extremely important to ensure a desired representation of the typeface in as many different applications as possible, depending on their own strategy.
This subpage displays all vertical metric values of a font both as values and visually.
Compare
The common way to compare fonts using FontDrop! is to display each font in its own browser tab. On this page, two fonts can be compared side by side. This page doesn’t provide as much detail and information as the main page and is primarily intended for viewing text and word samples in, for example, different versions of the same typeface. This can be particularly helpful in the design process for new typefaces or when comparing similar typefaces from the same genre.
Language Report
This page examines the language support of a font and displays the supported languages with their corresponding characters. So far the FontDrop! language database contains more than 180 languages in 24 scripts. The database focuses on the most widely spoken main languages and has a Eurocentric background. If you miss a language or script just get in touch.
To achieve true language support, more is needed than just the letters used in a given language. To truly represent language in a written form, punctuation and other supplementary characters are also necessary. However, the FontDrop! database takes a simplified approach and only examines the characters belonging to a specific language. (For a significantly deeper and more detailed examination of language support, you can use Hyperglot by Rosettatype.)
The “Detected” tab contains a list of all languages recognized in the inserted font file, as well as all characters belonging to each language.
The “Database” tab displays a list of all languages in the FontDrop! language database. Once a font file has been uploaded, all languages and characters it contains are highlighted in green color.
Search Glyphs
Modern fonts can contain many glyphs. This page helps to find specific glyphs in a font file. The site offers two ways to search for specific characters or groups of characters: firstly, by entering a search term, and secondly, by searching for categories.
Searching
Enter a glyph name, a Unicode value, or simply a character in the search field. Multiple search terms must be separated by commas.
The naming of individual glyphs in a typeface is a rather internal matter. Unlike Unicode, which assigns exactly one code point to each character, there is no uniform standard for naming characters. (The Adobe Glyph List is the closest thing to a standard.) Glyph names are not used by the applications either. So the glyph ‘a’ with unicode ‘0041’ can be named ‘a’, but also ‘uni0041’ or just any other name. Keep this in mind!
For Unicode values, the search can be either a value itself or ‘U+’ value , for example: ‘0041’ or ‘U+0041’.
You can also simply search for a character. Searching for ‘a’ returns all glyphs whose name contains ‘a’, e.g., ‘alpha’, ‘beta’, ‘gamma’. There is an additional prefix search using ‘/’, which only finds glyph names that begin with the search term. A search for ‘/a’ therefore returns all glyphs whose name begins with ‘a’, such as ‘alpha’ or ‘arrow’, but not ‘beta’.
By category
All glyphs in the font file are categorized, and the respective categories can be displayed via the buttons.
Glyphs that don’t fall into any of the categories are grouped under the group ‘Uncategorized’. These are typically substitute or any other alternative characters that also have no unicode value and can only be accessed via OpenType features.
There is also a toggle for ‘Show all glyphs in the font by index’. This shows the order in which the glyphs are stored in the font files.
(Should new subpages be added, they will be also added here.)
