Accountinig for Fonts
By Adam Twardoch | www.fontlab.com
All the niggling rules and best practices for font design could send even an accountant looking for the aspirin bottle. And yet, they are necessary in order to create robust fonts that will work on all platforms and applications. Thus, keeping your fonts in the black (so to speak) involves a lot of attention to detail.
Accountants have auditors who come along and double-check their work. Typographers have FontAudit – a system that does a similar thing for fonts. FontAudit is part of FontLab. It’s like an app within the program that runs tests on selected glyphs for things like unwanted loops and unnecessary points – about 18 different tests in all. Many of these errors would be invisible except on very close inspection, and manually checking a font for all of them would take an enormous amount of time.
When you open a glyph in a glyph window and turn on FontAudit, a bunch of colored symbols appear on the glyph outline (Figure 1.) If you click one of these places, a dialog appears that explains why FontAudit raised a flag. You can fix this problem or all problems in the glyph. Open the FontAudit panel to see and fix FontAudit problems, and use the period and comma keys go through all glyphs in the font (Figure 2).
