Checking an entry: how to verify anything on this reference yourself

Why the method is published instead of an address

A reference that answers questions privately is a reference whose readers have to trust it. A reference that publishes its method is one they can check. The second is more useful and it scales, so this page records the way each class of figure here was produced rather than offering somewhere to send a query.

The practical consequence for a reader who thinks something here is wrong: the fastest route to an answer is to run the measurement, because the sources are all public and none of them is held privately by this site.

Type metrics: read from the font file

Every letterform measurement quoted here comes out of the font binaries this domain serves. They are at /assets/fonts/ and they can be downloaded directly.

The numbers are read from two places inside the file. The OS/2 table carries the declared cap height and x-height in font units, and head.unitsPerEm gives the size of the em square those units are measured against, so x-height as a percentage of the em is one division. The ascender and descender figures are ink extents rather than declared metrics: the actual top of b, d, h, k and l, and the actual bottom of g, j, p, q and y, taken from the glyph outlines.

Any font-tooling library reads all of that in a few lines. Where a figure is quoted at a pixel size, the conversion is the font-unit value multiplied by the pixel size and divided by unitsPerEm, which is why every such figure carries the size it was taken at.

Contrast ratios: computed, not judged

The ratios quoted on colour and contrast are computed from the relative luminance of the two colours, using the standard formula rather than an impression. The colours themselves are in the stylesheet this page is served with, so both inputs are available to anyone reading.

Any contrast checker will reproduce them from the two hex values. Where a figure here disagrees with one, the hex values are the thing to compare first: a ratio quoted against the wrong pair of colours is the usual cause.

Catalogue figures: dated on purpose

The download counts and listing dates on the display catalogue are what the catalogue showed on the day that entry was last revised, and the revision date is printed on the entry. They move, and a figure presented as current would be wrong within a week of publication.

Each is checkable at its source: the entry links to the catalogue listing for every face that has a live one, and says plainly which faces did not resolve at the address the others use.

Claims about licences

Licence statements here describe the terms as published by the licensor. Where this reference and a licence file disagree, the licence file governs; it is the copy that travelled with the software and it is the copy that would be read in a dispute. That is stated on the licensing entry as well, because it is the single most consequential sentence on it.

Nothing here is legal advice, and no entry should be relied on in place of reading the terms that apply to a specific file.

Drawn figures

Two of the figures are drawn rather than photographed or typeset. The annotated letterform is ruled to measurements read from the font file, as above. The six class skeletons are constructed from one shared frame with only the class-defining features varied, and the stroke ratio drawn in each is printed underneath it, so the drawing can be checked against its own caption without leaving the page.

What this page does not do

It does not take commissions, it does not arrange design work, and it does not host the twelve free display typefaces it records. Those are covered on the about entry, which sets out what the reference is for.