
Text for Proofing Fonts: A Farewell to the Quick Brown Fox - cardamomo
https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts
======
crazygringo
Very interesting article, but set up against a strange straw man.

First, the usefulness of a full _page_ of text for critically analyzing a font
is obviously extremely useful _for type designers_ looking for flaws to fix,
or perhaps a national newspaper or magazine selecting a new body type that
must be absolutely flawless. This is indeed a great text for proofing fonts.

But "quick brown fox" was never intended for proofing fonts. When the author
says pangrams are "singularly useless" for that, he's right, but they're very
good for something _else_.

Mainly, browsing fonts in a catalog to get the full personality at a single
glance, on a single line. Above all what kind of "a", "e", "f", "g", "j", "l",
"t", and "w" it has, since these (in non-italic) generally have the most
variation. To check if there are any letters the font does something "weird"
with. And just get an overall basic sense of look and spacing.

So setting the paragraphs he comes up with, as a _replacement_ for pangrams,
just feels like the entirely wrong way to frame it.

(All that said, I have _insane_ respect for the man -- his designs set _the_
absolute top bar.)

~~~
noizejoy
Mmmhh - I’m not a font designer, but just someone who chooses fonts for
websites on a regular basis.

And I’ve often found myself frustrated about not finding a good representative
page of text, allowing me to evaluate fonts better than just single sentences.

So this is a hugely welcome addition to my toolkit - definitely _replacing_
pangrams for me and big thanks to Mr. Hoefler for making it publicly
available.

~~~
daxterspeed
I think the parent argued that both serve a purpose. When you're dealing with
a large selection of fonts a small pangram is more useful to help you narrow
the list down - until it becomes small enough that you can switch to one of
these font proofs to evaluate the final few fonts.

Websites like Google Fonts should absolutely use one of these font proofs for
the dedicated font pages - or when simply comparing two fonts, but use a
shorter pangram when comparing several fonts at once.

~~~
beardyw
I think there is a general problem of fonts being treated as if they were all
equivalent when in reality there are fonts which can only be sanely used as
display fonts, and body text fonts which admittedly you might use as both. The
computer has lumped them all together in a way a type setter would never do.
So, yes, different approaches for different uses.

As to choosing a font, having had a typographer, a graphic designer and a book
dealer as 3 of my brother's, it is a job which I can hardly find the courage
to do. I also regularly wish others shared my self doubt and left it to a
professional, or at least just followed conventional wisdom. A font you notice
is a bad font.

------
JaceLightning
Every. Single. Day.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=typography.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=typography.com)

~~~
gitgud
Woah, that's even more interesting. You can see the effect different titles
have on the popularity of the exact same link.

~~~
slezyr
Can you? There is a link with the exact same title but with 2 points.

~~~
gitgud
Actually, yeah you're right, it only occurs in some cases, so the title seems
to be of less importance than I thought... weird

------
unhammer
I was hoping to find a good example text here, but this still just covers a
fraction of ascii. In 2020, you have to expect das große ß und من اليمين الى
اليسار and perhaps even ө, ү, ң (which should be the same height as о, у, and
н[1]). So far [2] is the only page I've found with some representative
samples.

[1] [https://github.com/mozilla/voice-
web/issues/1141#issue-33511...](https://github.com/mozilla/voice-
web/issues/1141#issue-335119936)

[2]
[http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/unitest/](http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/unitest/)

~~~
Someone
I guess you mean Unicode, not ascii. It covers just a fraction (about half of
it) of ascii, but not for those reasons.

I would add digits and more punctuation. Question marks, for example, can be
cases where type designers let loose their creativity.

I think the sample also is biased towards English. It’s missing letter
combinations such as “sch” and “cht” that aren’t uncommon in German (or
French, which has the wonderful word “schtroumpfs” since 1958), or the pairs
“au” or “oe”, used in Dutch, all of which may have ligatures.

------
pitdicker
I am missing words with 'ij' in the proof text. If they do not look roughly
similar and with their dots on the same height, the font looks pretty bad in
Dutch (ij is a frequent combination, and often even taught as one letter).
Should a proof text care about a few of such language specific cases?

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remcob
As a typography and Polish enthusiast, it bugs me that "Zloty" is not spelled
"Złoty" with an 'ł'.

------
fxtentacle
This sounds like a perfect use-case for AI.

1\. You run statistics on a large text corpus to determine the most likely
letter combinations that a font needs to display correctly.

2\. You train a skip-word model on a large text corpus to evaluate if a
sentence makes sense or not.

3\. You train an AI to produce random sentences that match the word-pair-
probabilities from #1 while being natural sentences according to #2.

=> You should end up with natural-sounding text with proper grammar that still
contains all the important character pairs for font testing.

~~~
zeepzeep
And there's your next covid project!

~~~
fxtentacle
Sounds great :) I wonder if FontGAN could then be used to design the perfect
font.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12604](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12604)

That said, I already have my covid project. All state of the art optical flow
algorithms have problems seeing thin branches. You might have seen videos of
Skydio drones crashing into branches, wires, or water. My goal is to fix that.

I started designing a new AI architecture in February and the main detection
training finished mid-May. By now, I'm building the post-processing for
guessing plausible fillings for occluded areas.

Plus, I'm now working from home, so my basement is already overheating from
all those GPUs. I should probably pause AI for a while or I'll have to move
the icebox to another floor.

------
parhamn
For those interested Hoefler and typography.com were covered in Netflix’s
Abstract (last episode of season 2 I think). I really enjoyed it and learned a
few things about typography in general.

------
eganist
I see the value in the author's mission to create a replacement for pangrams,
but it sounds less like he replaced pangrams (on which I've always been sold
as being a tool for content creators to quickly visualize a font with loose
approximations of common use cases) and more like he came up with a quicker
letterproof.
[http://famira.com/article/letterproef](http://famira.com/article/letterproef)

Almost like unit testing a font more efficiently rather than using a full
letterproof for that process. Which is pretty cool and probably fills a need,
though maybe not the same need that pangrams address more broadly.

\--

I'm not an expert on this topic and am prepared to have what I've learned in
the last five minutes fact-checked by someone who actually does this for a
living.

~~~
mark-r
The author is someone who "does this for a living", and has for a very long
time. His Hoefler Text font was included by Apple with the Mac since 1991.

~~~
eganist
You're right, I gathered that when I read his wiki page before commenting.

But I'm still confused as to why pangrams were mentioned, is my point.

~~~
mark-r
For a very long time, pangrams were used to demonstrate typefaces because they
were the shortest string that included every letter. I think it was perceptive
of him to realize that they weren't optimized for showing letters in their
typical settings.

------
rosstex
Side note, I really like the illustration on this article.

------
temporallobe
Sometimes you just need large quantities of text to see how it really fills a
space for proofing. What about using good old lorem ipsun text or the copious
number of ipsum variations that generate natural-sounding sentences in almost
every imaginable combination?

------
Pxtl
You can pry "Sphynx of black quartz, hear my vow" from my cold dead hands.

~~~
twicetwice
That's missing "d", "g", "i", and "j", unless I'm missing something.

Just for fun, the JavaScript one-liner I used to check:

    
    
      const check = str => [...Array(26)].map((t, i) => String.fromCharCode("a".charCodeAt(0) + i)).filter(l => str.indexOf(l) < 0)

~~~
5mk
Yeah, I believe the line is “... judge my vow” for that reason. (Sphinx
supplies the “I”)

------
totetsu
Just tried to try this out.. Has anyone else noticed how slow and unusable the
Font Book app built into osx is.

------
amelius
Imho, the repetition in that text makes the font look ugly. And why not use
full English sentences, instead of something you would never read?

------
scotty79
Why use "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" if you could use "Sphinx
of black quartz, judge my vow"...

~~~
kick
Must we really fill the comments of Hacker News with lazy twitter copypasta?

[https://twitter.com/JackOfQuills/status/984290288259788800](https://twitter.com/JackOfQuills/status/984290288259788800)

~~~
scotty79
Sorry. It spent in my brain clipboard so long that I forgot where I copied it
from. And I don't do twitter.

~~~
raphlinus
If you do do twitter,
[https://twitter.com/pangramtweets](https://twitter.com/pangramtweets) is fun.

One of my favs (apropos for the HN crowd): I would code it differently by
sending the ajax request to the backend server and randomize the number there
:Grinning face with smiling eyes: #magento #php #laravel

