The Choose Your Own Adventure typeface…

…is ITC Benguiat.

Fixing font file names

Image by arnoKath via Flickr

So you want to rationalise your font directory? Let’s face it, who doesn’t?

I had a bunch of old CDs lying around with fonts scattered throughout them. Going through each in turn I copied all the font files into a single working directory:

find -iname "*.ttf" -exec cp "{}" ~/fontwork

I also threw my installed fonts into the mix:

cp ~/.fonts/* ~/fontwork

fontwork ended up containing 1300+ files. Many of these had awful names like “basd12.ttf”. Just awful.

I decided to fix them up by extracting the embedded family and style information. Neither apt-cache nor google could find me an existing utility to pull out this info, so I quickly wrote one using the excellent freetype2 library. It’s imaginatively called fontinfo. I also wrote a little shell script to rename the font files and remove duplicates.

You can snag both from my github repository.

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