Determine which fonts are Human Readable

[John Baro]

I need to determine which fonts are human readable.
Webdings, wingdings etc.. are not.
Is there any easy way to accomplish this?
Cheers
JB

[Randy A. Ynchausti]

John,

I need to determine which fonts are human readable.
Webdings, wingdings etc.. are not.
Is there any easy way to accomplish this?

Short of building a neural network trained to recognize whether a set of
characters is "human readable" or not, I would simply create an object that
knows which fonts are not readable. Then in my program, I would ask that
object if the font of interest "IsReadable( )." If it is not one of the
non-readable fonts, then my program would assume it is readable and answer
yes it is readable.

I tend to take the most simple approach when faced with these kinds of
programming issues. If you need help on the neural network solution, let me
know, but plan on spending a bit of time developing it.

I know that doesn't help much, but I hope it helps a little.

Regards,

Randy

[John Baro]

"Randy A. Ynchausti" <ra*************@msn.com> wrote in message
news:%2****************@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...

John,

I need to determine which fonts are human readable.
Webdings, wingdings etc.. are not.
Is there any easy way to accomplish this?
Short of building a neural network trained to recognize whether a set of
characters is "human readable" or not, I would simply create an object

that knows which fonts are not readable. Then in my program, I would ask that
object if the font of interest "IsReadable( )." If it is not one of the
non-readable fonts, then my program would assume it is readable and answer
yes it is readable.
I was hoping you wouldnt say that :)

I had hoped that someone would have defined somewhere how to determine
whether a font was HR or not.

I suppose you could read wingdings and webdings anyway, if you took the time
to learn them :)
I tend to take the most simple approach when faced with these kinds of
programming issues. If you need help on the neural network solution, let me know, but plan on spending a bit of time developing it.
I suppose I could write a solution to analyze a specific letter in a
particular font and determine whether it conforms with a HR font or not. "W"
is quite hard to mistake.
I think I will have to go your route though, the only problem is this wont
cater for any "extra" fonts on clients machines.

Cheers
JB
I know that doesn't help much, but I hope it helps a little.

Regards,

Randy

[Julian Nicholls]

Another complication is human-readable by who? For example, on my XP
machine I have the fonts @SimHei and @SimSun, neither of which I can read
because they're Chinese, but to a Chinese person Courier New will be
unreadable.

Best Regards
Julian Nicholls

"John Baro" <jo***@NixSpaMiprimus.com.au.com.au> wrote in message
news:2h************@uni-berlin.de...

I need to determine which fonts are human readable.
Webdings, wingdings etc.. are not.
Is there any easy way to accomplish this?
Cheers
JB

[Julian Nicholls]

I just had another, far more useful, thought :-)

If you look at the charset setting of the font, you will discover that fonts
like WingDings and Webdings are SYMBOL_CHARSET which is a bit of a giveaway
for not being human-readable text, and the @SimHei and @SimSun fonts
mentioned in my other post are GB3212_CHARSET.

Other CHARSET possibilities include

ANSI_CHARSET, BALTIC_CHARSET, CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET,
DEFAULT_CHARSET, EASTEUROPE_CHARSET, GB2312_CHARSET,
GREEK_CHARSET, HANGUL_CHARSET, MAC_CHARSET,
OEM_CHARSET, RUSSIAN_CHARSET, SHIFTJIS_CHARSET,
TURKISH_CHARSET, VIETNAMESE_CHARSET,
JOHAB_CHARSET, ARABIC_CHARSET,
HEBREW_CHARSET, THAI_CHARSET

All the Best
Julian Nicholls
"John Baro" <jo***@NixSpaMiprimus.com.au.com.au> wrote in message
news:2h************@uni-berlin.de...

I need to determine which fonts are human readable.
Webdings, wingdings etc.. are not.
Is there any easy way to accomplish this?
Cheers
JB