When it comes to fonts & typography, it is often relegated to a
niche, only popular with designers and handful of font sites. The font
sites themselves are just a store front to sell fonts, often charging
more than the true value of the fonts.
Last week I stumbled upon everthingfonts.com and I think finally some one decided to create a level field in typography. Sure it does the usual with its fonts directory. But it also has many useful font utilities that can be used right from the browser. Pick any format to format conversion and you can do it there. They even managed to bring ttfdump back from the dead, along with pdffonts & ttfcoverage. Looking at some of the dates I think it is a very new site and must have been recently launched, but it packs impressive functionality.
The individual font display page provides more useful information than any other font site I have seen. The glyphs display seem to leverage html5 canvas drawing capability to provide very accurate rendition of the glyph as opposed to the usual contact sheet you see on most of the sites. While the glyph coverage table states the facts the unicode map provides a visual view of the glyph coverage.
But IMHO the biggest surprise is their just launched Fonts Market Place. I think it has the potential to level the playing field a little enabling smaller foundries and individual designers to sell their fonts here. The success of this market place depends on attracting buyers and sellers and convincing them that this is the place to do their font related business.
Elara Font Manager is also a nice tool that promises to keep your fonts in the cloud. I played with it for a while with the public fonts. If I have lot of personal fonts collection this is probably where I will keep and access them.
Overall I'm pretty impressed with the functionality of this site. I think it is a complete approach to font management and has lot of potential.
Last week I stumbled upon everthingfonts.com and I think finally some one decided to create a level field in typography. Sure it does the usual with its fonts directory. But it also has many useful font utilities that can be used right from the browser. Pick any format to format conversion and you can do it there. They even managed to bring ttfdump back from the dead, along with pdffonts & ttfcoverage. Looking at some of the dates I think it is a very new site and must have been recently launched, but it packs impressive functionality.
The individual font display page provides more useful information than any other font site I have seen. The glyphs display seem to leverage html5 canvas drawing capability to provide very accurate rendition of the glyph as opposed to the usual contact sheet you see on most of the sites. While the glyph coverage table states the facts the unicode map provides a visual view of the glyph coverage.
But IMHO the biggest surprise is their just launched Fonts Market Place. I think it has the potential to level the playing field a little enabling smaller foundries and individual designers to sell their fonts here. The success of this market place depends on attracting buyers and sellers and convincing them that this is the place to do their font related business.
Elara Font Manager is also a nice tool that promises to keep your fonts in the cloud. I played with it for a while with the public fonts. If I have lot of personal fonts collection this is probably where I will keep and access them.
Overall I'm pretty impressed with the functionality of this site. I think it is a complete approach to font management and has lot of potential.
