Standard Naming Convention for Font Files (1 Viewer)

[llyal]

Standard Naming Convention for Font Files

I have been designing a font viewer/manager. I have noticed that many of my differently named font files contain the same font. Is there some kind of standard naming convention to name font files or is it "anything goes"? If there are several different naming conventions, which is the most commonly used?

I am using True Type fonts.

Thank you!

--Llyal

 

[Old Gnome]

Have you looked in C:\Windows\Fonts?

oldgnome

 

[pcs]

you wrote:
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I have been designing a font viewer/manager.
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a couple of thoughts:

1. access is a really bad choice to try to do this with. can you really improve on the Windows font viewer/manager using access?

2. fonts are/were 'intellectual property' and in the early days the foundries that created a 'new font' tried to guard their designs with great zeal. therefore the 'name' of the font was akin to a Trademark.

today, font designers will 'knock off' a font and give it a different name to protect themselves from litigation. so it is inevitable that you will find many nearly-duplicate fonts with different names.

for example the font family: Helvetica, Arial, Swiss will have several many different names, but appear almost identical.

good luck,
al

 

[llyal]

I looked at c:\windows\fonts- it looks like a naming convention is used, but I cannot figure it out because it is not obvious; do you know what it is? I tried searching on the internet and found null;

Thanks for the explanation about why font file names are not following a strict naming convention- now I understand the "chaos" of having duplicate fonts with different file names;

I agree, Access is not the best choice for a font manager; my application is not really a "complete" font manager- it does enough manipulation of fonts to create custom print-outs of the fonts, something that cannot be done by available commercial software; because the app scans directories and determines fonts, I ran into a "font duplication" problem- this is how this naming convention question came up;

It look slike the solution is to choose one of the duplicates as the font-to-keep, and then delete the other duplicates; because the font file naming is not standardized, any font file name I choose would be a "right" choice;

Thanks for the insight and help,

--Llyal

 

[Rich]

Quick look at the Access Bible says you need to use MSACESS.EXE and API to do it. Still interested?