glyphviewer 0.3

A Django app for examining web fonts and the characters they contain.

About

Glyphviewer is a web application that analyses web font files. This app will parse any web font file provided as input, and will display its general information (such as name and copyright details) to the user. Glyphviewer also provides a testbed where users can enter text, and have it displayed using the font. Finally, this application can display the characters supported by the font along with their Unicode codepoints. A demonstration is available here.

Installation and Dependencies

Glyphviewer depends on the following software:

• Python 2.x

• Django 1.x

• The FontTools package for parsing TrueType and OpenType files.

• The WoffTools, package built on top of FontTools, for parsing WOFF files.

• Numerical Python (numpy), which is a dependency for both FontTools and WoffTools.

Once these libraries have been installed, the next stage is to install Glyphviewer from PyPI through the command:

pip install glyphviewer

The next stage is to add “glyphviewer” to your INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py, and add the desired URL in one of the urls.py files.

The final stage is to populate the directory with fonts where you display your chosen font or fonts. The Glyphviewer application comes with its own set of fonts adapted from the Free UCS Outline Fonts; they have been converted to WOFF form for quicker download. These can be moved into the correct directory via the following shell command:

python manage.py collectstatic

The font files wil then be moved into the {STATIC_ROOT}/glyphviewer/fonts/ directory, and the browser will read the files from the {STATIC_URL}/glyphviewer/fonts/ folder.

The HTML template files in this application have been redesigned to work with the Mezzanine CMS. The redesign removed any explicit references to particular stylesheets found with earlier versions. The app (and the fonts) are released under a GNU general public license. If you wish to do any changes, pop over to the GitHub repository for the app.

Versions

• 0.1 (June 11th 2011) - Initial release.

• 0.2 (June 28th 2013) - Added setup script to create a PyPI package. Removed bugs.

• 0.3 (February 15th 2014) - Made compatible with Mezzanine and Bootstrap, changed styles for errors, now handles empty local directories.

Copyright

The Glyphviewer app is copyright (c) 2008-2014 Peter Murphy <[e-mail]>.