Printing font specimens

[Pascal de Bruijn]

It would be nice if GNOME specimen would be capable of printing A4/Letter specimens of fonts.

A specimen would include:
- Font name
- Font weight
- Copyright info
- Type (OpenType/CFF, Type1, TrueType)

Basically all important metadata.

- Full lowercase and uppercase alphabets including numerals and most common punctionation (at 14pt or something like that)
- A sampletext at different points sizes. (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 24, 48?)
- Maybe single paragarph of lorem ipsum (www.lipsum.com), set at 11pt/13pt.

And _optionally_ a page number

Ideally it would be nice, if GNOME specimen would generate a index of the specimen pages, so specimen books can be easily produced.

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

Soemthing like this should use templates (or maybe "plugins"), so that it can be customized for e.g. people with other alphabets...

[wouter bolsterlee (wbolster)]

Bloat alert! Gnome Specimen is a *simple* tool to view and compare fonts ;)

[Denis Moyogo Jacquerye (moyogo)]

maybe this part could share code with http://sourceforge.net/projects/fntsample/

[dvh (packetbell)]

I think printing a sample is a crucial feature, especially when choosing smaller font sizes for body text. A 10pt Bitsream Charter doesn't render very well at 96dpi, but looks great at higher resolutions.

>>> A sampletext at different points sizes. (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 24, 48?)
>>> Maybe single paragarph of lorem ipsum (www.lipsum.com), set at 11pt/13pt.
Good idea. Or Unix daily fortune/quote.

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

Wouter: a specimen print option could call a separate application, it doesn't have to bloat the main application...

[wouter bolsterlee (wbolster)]

What should the "printing functinonality" look like? Should it print all selected fonts, just like the previews display?

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

I think both a "typesheet" (showing 1 font in detail) and a comparison like the previews display could be useful, but maybe Pascal can answer best what he was looking after...

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

I don't think fntsample is such a good plan, mainly because it generates a rather ugly specimen sheet.

It's just a grid with the characters.

Something like this would be more appropriate:

---
Font Title (24pt Bold)

A-Z (18pt)
a-z (18pt)
0-9.,:;!?() (18pt)

The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly (10pt)
The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly (12pt)
The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly (18pt)
The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly (24pt)
The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly (36pt)
The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly (48pt)

Lorem Ipsum (11pt Bold)
A paragraph of lorem ipsum (11pt)
Second paragraph of lorem ipsum (11pt Italic)
---

Please note that this is just a concept.

[soc (simon-ochsenreither)]

I would love to see this feature, too!

I use gnome-specimen to decide which font to choose for certain projects, but to see if a font fits for large texts I have to print them out absolutely, because the display's 96 dpi aren't enough.

Wouter, you could probably look at some foundry's specimen papers for inspiration.

Imo this layout looks very nice: http://praegnanz.de/file_download/52
(Just visit the site for specimens with other fonts.)

Thanks!