On Sat, Jun 4, 2022 at 3:33 PM home user <mattisonw@comcast.net> wrote:
I have a few minutes to come back to this.

It seems to me that the font tools do not have a minor bug. Rather, they
were probably fine years ago when fonts were fewer and generally
simpler.  Now there are more fonts, and they seem to be more
complicated.  So either the font tools need major enhancement or new
tools are needed.

I don't have the knowledge of fonts and fontology(?) to propose a good,
nearly complete set of requirements.  But a few things do come to mind,
such a ability to search, sort, and filter based on:
* characteristics such as serif vs. sans serif. vs. regular (like
Chinese kaiti) vs. cursive vs. (etc.).
* characteristics such as Type-1, Type-2, Open, True, etc.
* font name (font family?).
* character height and character width.
* stroke characteristics.
* inclusion of characters from specific languages.
Surely readers of this can think of other things.


I used to use xfontsel which has a search mechanism as you described.
But with fewer search options (for obvious reasons for the time)
and probably obsoleted by the various new font usages (display managers
and printers, etc.)

Yet I see that on my system

$ fc-list | wc -l
600
xlsfonts|wc -l
1088

so I don't really know how many fonts are on my system
nor how many are visible by which tool.


A bug does not make sense for this.  I think we've exhausted what can be
done with what is currently available.  So I'm marking this "CLOSED",
though people are free to comment further.  I thank those who
contributed for their time and efforts.