When is there going to be some new links on this site? Discuss.

I do have this concern: Replies to a straight “number” question could be misleading because several measures which are genuine yardsticks of quality may be either important or irrelevant for particular uses. Some examples …

A clean line along the edge of each character is really important for a book face, less so for a handwriting font, absurd for a grunge font.

Character widths that match expensive fonts used by typesetting machines would be critical for doing page layout for digital commercial publication, irrelevant if your final document is printed on your inkjet or laser printer, or reproduced by photo methods (copier, offset camera) from your paper output.

The number of characters in your font is important for many non-English languages using the Latin alphabet. Ligatures and alternate characters are a mark of quality, too. But if I am writing an ordinary business letter in English, I don’t need thousands of characters. If I am setting a headline, I may not even care if the font lacks numbers and punctuation!

Good hinting was hugely important when most office output was by 300 dpi laser printers. But an unhinted or poorly hinted font which gave crude results back then may be giving excellent results from 800 to 1200 dpi inkjets and lasers today. Quality hinting isn’t unimportant, but it has become less important. Same principle: operating systems now provide font smoothing for unhinted or poorly hinted screen faces. Output technology has reduced the requirements to get good looking documents and screens.

Finally, has a font which looks OK to its intended audience done its job? A largely typeface-ignorant audience liked it. So, does the fact a magazine editor or typeface professional would find the font somewhat improperly spaced or kerned make it unacceptable quality for its purpose?

I apologize if I’ve stepped over the line and begun to try answering the (yet unasked) question. But I thought we need some examples to explain why answers to a straight “number” question might be more misleading than helpful. Lots of freeware would score poorly on some or all of those measures without, IMO, actually being poor quality for the purposes they are designed and used.

That said, most of us probably assume commercial offerings have a much higher proportion of quality offerings. But here’s a funny thought: If you count the huge number of cheap knock-off fonts sold on “5,000 for $5.00″ CDs as “commercial fonts,” which I suppose they are, it might skew straight “number” answers so much that the freeware would earn a higher “quality to crap” ratio than the commercial fonts!

My question would be, what is the relationship of the percentage of free treasures to trash versus the relationship to commercial treasures to trash (i.e., it is certainly not 50/50 and 50/50…)

i’ve been trying many apps.
just got FontExpert 2004.

http://www.proximasoftware.com/fontexpert/index.html

it’s not free… you can try it for 30 days.
just $35.00 if you decide to buy.

i like it alot.

( Oh, And guess what, Youre still linking / refering to it, soo.. )