I moved and reworked my TTF-OTF font comparison site

[Ken Moffat]

In the past I have mentioned my old website which included, amongst
other things, PDFs with examples of the glyphs from selected libre
fonts, and reports on which languages I thought they supported.
Targetted at Linux users, maybe applicable to users of BSDs or
similar.

List year I started to revise that, and received help (also much
more recently) from people on the TL lists - leading me to conclude
that in many cases I had overestimated the available accents etc for
Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek text (I had also missed some indicators of
missing glyphs in a '?' or boxed 'X' form, even back to 2016)

Meanwhile, I was aware that downloading a PDF from an http:// link
is now not recommendable.  I've now found a provider I can happily
work with, so the new site is https://typosetting.co.uk.

I had hoped to provide light and dark styles, without using
javascript, but in the end was unable to do that.  So I have moved
to a dark(ish) style - not as dark as some sites beloved of macOS
developers - with white normal text.

In the old version I had 3 sets of tables (original, later
additions - both mostly in order by the names used in fontconfig -
and a third table where I added things as I became aware of them).
The numbers are used as references from some of the PDFs, so I did
not want to renumber.

The new table is even wider - I repeated the numeric identifier at
the far end, to help if you scroll across - and then I added a
'Revised' column.  At first that only contained the date I had
revised the identifier-languages.pdf file [1.]

Later I realised that if this is going to go anywhere (I'm not
convinced my eyesight will definitely let me keep doing this,
although I hope to) then it needs to be repeatable / verifiable by
anyone who cares

So, all my .tex files should be accessible via the links -
identifier-languages.tex links are now in the 'Revised' column.

Any file with a revised date before 2024 might not compile on
XeLaTeX from TL2024, and very probably contains mistakes about which
current languages using Latin, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets it really
supports.  In all cases, you obviously need the fonts, and where I
have specified a font using a PATH you would need to adjust that.

I hope I caught all the lowercase Proper Nouns and '\\' line breaks
in the 2024 files, but several are still missing a space after a comma in
explanatory text for Maltese words ending with accented vowels
supposedly not in their alphabet . I'm sure there are other errors.
Some earlier files have all those problems, as well as bad choices
of how to format UDFR Article 1 in the examples of the CJK
langueges.

There is a lot of introductory text, and background, on the
index.html and linked pages - I have attempted to narrow that down
to a more-manageable line-length : your viewer might be more ragged
than what I see, depending on your choice of fonts.

I think the result is a lot more usable than the previous site.

There are also links above the table of fonts, pointing to indexes
by the name known to fontconfig, and my identifier name (no spaces
in identifier names, spaces in Linux filenames when using tools can
be very painful.

Last year I started looking at Small Caps "hey, these are cool!)".
Ever wish you had not done something ?  I've now produce other PDFs
and source files for those (except small caps within a regular
monospace font - I cannot see the point).  Many of these badly
overflow the default margins unless action is taken.

More generally, anyone using XeLaTeX and Polyglossia _might_ find
interesting workarounds in my source files.

Lots of things I hope to eventually revise or add (documented on one
of the pages).  At this point the Noto CJK fonts are all up to date,
but other CJK fonts might have newer versions.

Hoping this is useful to someone,

ĸen

[1.] I had notes of those dates, but I seem to have deleted them in
the last few weeks.  The old PDFs were restored from git in 2018
after hitting space problems on my local fileserver, they picked up
the date I restored them.

-- 
Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead.