The "Too Many Typefonts" collection...

While cleaning my office, I found an old "shareware" CDROM from Chestnut CDROMs, probably dating back to the 1990s. Chestnut CDROMs was a publisher of shareware and freeware CDROMs, and this disk held a bunch of TrueType fonts. From the CDROM liner, it's unclear as to what the copyright status of these fonts might be. It appears that Chestnut New Media went out of business in the 1990s, and so any legal claims on this collection is probably tenuous at best. That being said, I have no knowledge of the legality of using any of these fonts, and no permission to redistribute the font collection is granted.

I've used gemini-cli to write a simple program to create an index of these font files. Feel free to use (and redistribute) the font-indexer.py file under the condition of the LICENSE.

A recent change has been made to correct a font rendering issue in both scripts, where characters were being cut off. The rendering logic has been updated to ensure full characters, including ascenders and descenders, are displayed correctly.

font-indexer.py

This script indexes TrueType and OpenType fonts in a specified directory, generates an HTML file with rendered previews of each font.

Usage:

python font-indexer.py [--font-dir FONT_DIRECTORY] [--output-dir OUTPUT_DIRECTORY] [--html-file HTML_FILENAME] [--font-size FONT_SIZE] [--text TEXT_TO_RENDER] [--slow-check] [-n NUMBER_OF_FONTS]

Arguments:

• --font-dir FONT_DIRECTORY: Directory to search for TrueType and OpenType fonts. Defaults to the current directory (.).
• --output-dir OUTPUT_DIRECTORY: The directory to save rendered font images. Defaults to renders.
• --html-file HTML_FILENAME: The name of the output HTML file. Defaults to index.html.
• --font-size FONT_SIZE: The font size to use for rendering. Defaults to 24.
• --text TEXT_TO_RENDER: The text to render for each font. Defaults to 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'.
• --slow-check: Perform a slower, more thorough check for font quality issues.
• -n NUMBER_OF_FONTS, --number NUMBER_OF_FONTS: Limit the total number of fonts to process.

Example:

python font-indexer.py --font-dir /path/to/my/fonts -n 50

font-renderer.py

This script renders text using a specified font and saves it as a PNG image. It also provides functionality to inspect character and glyph metrics.

Usage:

python font-renderer.py --font FONT_PATH [--font-size SIZE] [--text TEXT] [-o OUTPUT_PATH] [--preview] [--inspect CHAR] [--inspect-glyph-bbox CHAR]

Arguments:

• --font FONT_PATH: (Required) The path to the font file to use.
• --font-size SIZE: The font size to use for rendering. Defaults to 24.
• --text TEXT: The text to render. Defaults to 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'.
• -o OUTPUT_PATH, --output OUTPUT_PATH: The output filename for the rendered image. Defaults to output.png.
• --preview: If set, previews the output image using eog (Eye of GNOME).
• --inspect CHAR: Inspects the advance width and units per em of a specific character in the font.
• --inspect-glyph-bbox CHAR: Inspects the bounding box (xMin, yMin, xMax, yMax) of a specific glyph in the font.

Examples:

Render text to an image:

python font-renderer.py --font "path/to/YourFont.ttf" --text "Hello World" -o hello.png

Render text with a specific size and preview:

python font-renderer.py --font "path/to/YourFont.ttf" --font-size 48 --text "Large Text" --preview

Inspect character metrics:

python font-renderer.py --font "path/to/YourFont.ttf" --inspect A

Inspect glyph bounding box:

python font-renderer.py --font "path/to/YourFont.ttf" --inspect-glyph-bbox G