Re: [ft] Retrieving detailed info for fonts

[George Williams]

On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 06:00, Mr. Delphi Developer wrote:
> http://theshipmanfamily.com/FontInfo.png
> 
> Above is URL to a screenshot of the info on the Arial Font that a
> utility named The Font Thing creates. This utility is old and does not
> support Open Type Fonts. The author is nowhere to be found and I want
> to write a utility that does the same job as this one but support OTF
> and Type 1 fonts.
> 
> Anyone know how to get all that info from a particular font file?
Well, the first few sections live in the 'name' table of the font. This
will be exactly the same in a ttf and otf font.

The "Basic Typographical Metrics" is an amalgam of stuff from the 'head'
and 'hhea' tables. These will be exactly the same in a ttf and otf font.

The "Windows Metrics" comes from the "OS/2" table. This is also exactly
the same in a ttf and otf font.

My guess is that the only reason the tool doesn't work is that it
objects to the OpenType version number (which is different from the ttf
version numbers). If you have the source it should be easy to patch it
to accept a version of 'OTTO'.

If you don't have the source, well, you can get freetype to give you all
of those data.

> Can FreeType be used for this purpose and can anyone help out??
FreeType can extract those data from the font files. Outputting it and
formatting it nicely would be up to you.