Fonts (or should we say typeface?)

[jennybc]

For cleaning up the answers to "what's your favourite font?". What are definitive lists of fonts/typefaces?

Responses to this tweet:

• Wikipedia list of typefaces
• alternate sites such as http://www.dafont.com ... scrape it?
• Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr) lists what he thinks are the legit fonts just in the "creative responses" I tweeted about: https://gist.github.com/hrbrmstr/81b2df8b5a3583c8638c

[hrbrmstr]

Those "alternate sites" are the thing that's going to be problematic. There are at least 30 "non-mainstream" font purveyors (my mental recall is saying that there were probably 3-4 represented in those "creative responses") and then there's the "I'll just stick my font on github and post it to my blog and hacker news" fonts, too). However, scraping those font sites may be a decent route, but you'll also have to employ the stringdist package since many of the, er, "helpful" responders seem to have an issue with spelling recall (and since font names are really ngrams that'll be an interesting problem to solve as well :-)

Here's a fairly comprehensive list of non-mainstream sites (not all have uniform site formats for scraping, tho):

c("http://fontfabric.com/", "http://fonts.artill.de/", "http://fontstruct.com", 
"http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/", "http://iginomarini.com/fell/", 
"http://jeffreyschreiber.nl/", "http://losttype.com/browse/", 
"http://moorstation.org/fontennium/fontennium.htm", "http://theoatmeal.com/blog/free_fonts", 
"http://www.1001freefonts.com", "http://www.1001freefonts.com/index.htm", 
"http://www.abstractfonts.com/", "http://www.creativebloq.com/graphic-design-tips/best-free-fonts-for-designers-1233380", 
"http://www.dafont.com/", "http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html", 
"http://www.fontcab.com/", "http://www.fontflood.com", "http://www.fontgarden.com/", 
"http://www.fontparadise.com", "http://www.fontsquirrel.com/", 
"http://www.freefontsnow.com", "http://www.glukfonts.pl/fonts.php?l=en", 
"http://www.google.com/webfonts", "http://www.josipkelava.com/", 
"http://www.kevinandamanda.com/fonts/", "http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/free-fonts/", 
"http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/", "http://www.thenorthernblock.co.uk/fonts/free", 
"http://www.urbanfonts.com/free-fonts.htm", "http://www.wetecacahuete.com/"
)