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Best practices when making text/test documents for font testing

Eben Sorkin
17.Oct.2007 10.00am
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I recently posted a text file* to help people who want to quickly get a sense of how their font looks in a variety of languages.
But one of the people using it says they can't see all the glyphs. The format I uses windows linebreaks and Unicode 8 no BOM. I could have used just Unicode 8 or Unicode 16, or Unicode 16, No BOM, or Unicode 16 Little Endian, or Unicode 16 Little Endian, No BOM.

Any idea what line break type is going to be most compatible - and perhaps more importantly what Unicode encoding is best & why?

* The thread is here if you want to use the file or do a technical check:

http://typophile.com/node/31399

It is also here in v1.2:

AttachmentSize
Languages at a glance.v1.2.txt49 KB
Languages at a glance.v1.2.pdf107.82 KB
Ralf Herrmann
17.Oct.2007 10.08am
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The most important thing is not to share this as TXT, since the application will need to guess the encoding or even worse: use the default. Make it an RTF and choose the encoding and everything will be fine.


Florian Hardwig
17.Oct.2007 10.17am
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Just some feedback:
I opened your file with several applications on Mac OSX (10.4).

  • TextEdit: When I open it with the default settings (‘Open files using automatic encoding detection’), there are issues, i.e. ø in Sørensen = √∏, for example. Changing the preferences to ‘Open files using UTF-8‘ helps.
  • Similar with Safari. ø = ø Switching from ‘Standard’ to ‘Unicode (UTF-8)’ helps
  • My favourite text editor, skEdit, gets it right in the first place. Its preferences say ‘Open files with UTF-8’

Hope that is of use for somebody.


Pieter van Rosmalen
17.Oct.2007 10.49am
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TextWrangler also opens the file correctly.
Textwrangler is free.


Pieter van Rosmalen
17.Oct.2007 10.50am
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http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/


Pieter van Rosmalen
17.Oct.2007 10.51am
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On Mac OSX (10.4)


aric
17.Oct.2007 10.58am
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I think UTF-8 enjoys broader support than 16-bit Unicode. But Ralf is probably right in suggesting a format that can represent the encoding explicitly.


Eben Sorkin
17.Oct.2007 11.30am
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Thanks everybody. This was very helpful!

I will fix some errors that have come to light and re-post v1.1 in 3 formats: TXT RTF & PDF.

By the way; TextEdit can be made to use 'Unicode UTF-8' also. But you have to make a change in the preferences.

The other thing which I neglected to say and may be useful to know is that to test for Lingala ( one of the languages ) you must have extended Latin -B support in the font being tested. I would like to add more languages like this over time. Maybe then I can group them by Latin, Latin A & Latin B.

What do you think?


Eben Sorkin
17.Oct.2007 2.56pm
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The revised (v1.1) files are up. If people want the RTF they will have to email me until such a time as Typophile adds it as a supported file type in threads.


sii
17.Oct.2007 3.05pm
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Cool, thanks for posting.

I was wondering why "Type" is capitalized on the first line and then spotted a couple of other typos - "greared" & "Cyrilic".

Thx, Si


Eben Sorkin
17.Oct.2007 10.38pm
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Thanks Simon!


Eben Sorkin
18.Oct.2007 9.36am
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I have update both threads to have the latest version: 1.2