Thomas posted recent to his blog that the icons use by Adobe were available to anyone who wished to use them.

Wish I'd known that yesterday!

Anyway, I went through the process of making my own set, and came up with some slightly different designs, and some extra glyphs, such as one to represent Unicase.

But the question still stands (irrespective of Adobe's generosity) -- wouldn't a standardized set be useful?

Are these Adobe icons consistent with the icons in Illustrator, etc?

> Wish I’d known that yesterday!

This is one instance in which RSS really comes in handy.

Kudos to Adobe and Thomas for making these available.

I'm not sure if they are consistent. I've pointed Thomas and Miguel toward this thread.

I agree it might - as long as the symbols are really used by buyers ( are they? ) and as long as they are quite well designed. I have been meaning to look at the Adobe symbols but have not done it yet. I finally will now. Nick, care to show us your designs?

I had a look the adobe icons seem nice although they do seem very print oriented as the Gifs are a bit fuzzy. Now I need to look at the others...

I have looked at the adobe, Myfonts and Fonts.com examples now.

Looking at these things a bit more I have to admit, and I acknowledge I may be in the minority, I wouldn't buy based on what I thought the icon may or may not mean. I would have to check. Really it would be better to have it spelled out.

"Ordinals" "Greek" "Polytonic" "Small Caps" etc.,

Which really means that for me at least the icons don't really "work". They make things look systematized but they don't do much else for me. eg I don't get information at a glance from these - with a few exceptions.

Ligatures, subscript, euro.

As I say it may also be that people who buy fonts all the time come to know what they mean. No doubt such people must be catered to!

The other thing is that the symbols in the rounded boxes are a bit too pinched up against the edges. I get claustrophobic* looking at them. I think that they might be better bigger and with most of the extra space going to giving the symbols enough "air" to be seen properly. Seeing them in Fontlab I feel fine because I am looking at them much larger. Made into 12 inch 6 inch or even 3 inch high examples & printed I bet they are quite fine indeed, but as tiny icons on a screen - not so much.

* Okay this is hyperbole... Sorry.

Well, nobody has to use them, and if you think they would be better with a little tweaking, well the licensing terms certainly allow it. You could tweak the outline font and generate your own GIFs, or whatever you like.

BTW, if the icons are a bit cryptic, you can always make the "alt" text descriptive, so that if somebody hovers their pointer over the icon, it acts like a tooltip.

Cheers,

T

Right Eben, the symbols don't do enough on their own, mainly providing a bit of branding and the impression of lots of content value. So they need text support to explain things further. Adobe does well online (the fact that their icons are scalable also means they are a comfortable size, compared to the gifs at MyFonts and Linotype), and FontShop, by eschewing icons on its site, and pointing customers towards a FontFont pdf where there is plenty of space to explain the icons, does a good job too.

I'll just be adding to the confusion because, you know, every designer thinks they can create a better icon-system, and every foundry wants to use its own typefaces.

Is there any merit in consistent text? For instance, would it be useful to settle on a letter of the alphabet to represent small caps? At the moment the candidates, in this short survey, are A, B, and K.

Thomas, I realize my tone may have been a little flip. If it felt like even a small slap, I apologize. In fact, my hat is off to Adobe to for making these and so many other resources available to the font community.

For me it's more a question of when icons help & when they don't. Also, clearly some ideas lend themselves more readily than others.

It also has to do with how they are used. It could be that with explanations and even examples that come up with a mouse over -even little animations the demonstrate the change, that the icons start to work better.

Still, the icons I like best are the Fontshop examples, in no small part because of the space around the icons themselves.

I’ll just be adding to the confusion Very possibly.

in this short survey, are A, B, and K. By far and away "A" is my choice. To me "A" stands for alphabet like no other Glyph.

“A” stands for alphabet like no other Glyph.

Yes, that was my thinking, and "1" for numbers, which is why the Shinn system (bottom of the five in my previous post) uses them almost exclusively .
I could even have used two forms of "a" for the "stylistic alternate" icon, instead of g, were it not for the fact that the fonts of mine which have such alternates contain two g's, but only one form of "a".

and “1” for numbers

That is tougher because 1 can look like an el "l". Also other numbers get more obviously altered by the various states. 3 5 & 6 for instance. A number pair might be best. 2 & 5 maybe? Or a triplet? "512" to be a full-on geek?

Using "g" for stylistic alternatives seem quite inevitable - at least at first. The tricky part is that the two g shapes often look like separate fonts which isn't the idea at all. Adobe being the nearly the exception. In some ways the example of the e with & without swash might be the better one. it's clearly the same style. A different swashed glyph might be better however... Waht about an "a" that is double story & one that is not? It might be the same problem as the g - it could like just two different fonts. But at least it is an "a" then.

See the image below

It is from JPF's http://www.typofonderie.com/

See also his opentype features page:

http://www.typofonderie.com/alphabets/technical/opentypefeatures

1 can look like an el “l”.

OK, I'll remove the foot serifs.

Eben,

No, I wasn't at all offended. I'm just saying they're free, and it might be easier to modify these icons than do your own from scratch - and closer to a "standard."

Personally, in thinking of these from an end user POV, if they use the icons at all, they are likely to have one of two approaches, depending on the situation:

- there are one or two particular features I need, so I figure out what the icons are for those and keep my eyes peeled for them as I scan through the fonts.

- I'm just interested in how "feature-laden" the fonts are in general, so I prefer fonts with more cool icons.

Some will be using both approaches at the same time, of course.

T

I know I can't say anything without it appearing biased, but I'll risk it anyway. I think the idea of using all A and 1 is interesting, albeit a little staid, but then you can't only use those so the concept falls apart and you end up using of glyphs anyway. I like that Adobe's icons do not use just one or two glyphs. Additionally I think they do all work and those which are slightly confusing to me might not be to someone looking for something specific. (And, they use tooltips so that helps clear up the final bit of confusion.)

likely to have one of two approaches

A third approach: those who are studying the feature sets of typefaces.

Would it help if there was any kind of arrangement to these icons, like a sort of periodic table of elements? It may allow one to see not only the glyphs included, but also excluded a little more clearly. I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but the possibility of grouping glyphs of certain categories together, or keeping them in the same places would possibly allow each foundry to employ some artistic liberty on the icons (i.e. their own typeface).

I'm just the kid at the adult's table here, but that's what immediately popped into my head.

I am considering adding to the Adobe icon set...

Has anyone done icons for the following:
I ask for consistency amongst foundries:

a Roman Numerals
a Titling Alternatives [See Titling Caps]
a All Caps [Increased Letterspace]
a Pi Characters
a Basic Maths Symbols
a Basic Currency
a Historic Forms
a Typographic Annotations (Rather than Annotations and/or superscript) (I haven't worked this out yet)
a Tabulated Figures [FontFont is good here]
a Slashed Zero????

/m