Hi everyone!
I’ve been building Fontspan, a native Mac app that checks a font’s coverage and tells you exactly what’s missing and recommends next steps.
Next Steps recommends glyphs that would immediately complete a whole block, glyphset, or language. It is a shortlist of high-leverage wins, not everything that’s missing.
It cross-references three things at once:
Unicode blocks
Google Fonts glyphsets
Language coverage (via Hyperglot)
For .glyphs files specifically, it reads them directly and copies the correct glyph name to your clipboard for anything missing.
Supports Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek, each with a tiered pipeline (Core/Plus/Pro), plus a historical-characters set for Cyrillic and an archaic-characters set for Greek.
$100, one time, no subscription. 15-day free trial, no payment info needed: fontspan.app
If you give it a try and anything feels off or missing, I’d really like to know.
Hi @SCarewe Good question! TalkingLeaves is a useful tool for exploring language coverage directly in Glyphs. Both tools use language data from Hyperglot, but they approach coverage differently.
TalkingLeaves focuses on languages and the characters needed to support them. Fontspan brings together three layers of coverage: Unicode blocks, Google Fonts glyphsets, and languages. It shows what’s present, what’s missing, and which glyphs could extend coverage the most.
Fontspan is also a standalone macOS app. It works with .glyphs source files as well as exported .ttf and .otf fonts, so you can check your work while designing or analyze the font you’ve exported, without needing to work inside Glyphs.
You’re right about the .glyphs part: if you’re exporting anyway, reading the source file directly isn’t an advantage on its own. It’s more about convenience and being able to go back and forth between Fontspan and Glyphs.
The real difference is what you described: Fontspan cross-references Unicode blocks, Google Fonts glyphsets, and language coverage, then uses that to recommend which glyphs are worth prioritizing, the ones that would complete a whole block, glyphset, or language, rather than just listing everything that’s missing.
But honestly, if you’re comfortable building that cross-reference yourself across the three sources with scripts, you probably don’t need Fontspan. The whole idea is to help with this part of the process, whether during your workflow (using the .glyphs file) or at the end of it.
I really appreciate your honesty here. Comments like this help us understand where Fontspan needs to offer more value and what can be improved.
One question I think is worth asking these days: what’s the real added value of a tool, and what makes it hard to rebuild with an LLM?
Over the past few years I’ve used LLMs more and more to build scripts, plugins and tools for type design. Writing code has become almost free, so most of a tool’s value now lies in the concept behind it.
Your tool’s concept is interesting, but it’s also very easy to replicate for anyone with basic LLM skills. I’m not encouraging people to copy other people’s tools, but that’s the reality: rebuilding something like this is now child’s play.
Price is part of the problem. Glyphs costs 320€, and it lets you do many things you couldn’t do without it. Your tool costs 90€, a third of that, to browse across three open-source datasets.
Because development time has collapsed, I expect plugin and extension prices to come down over the next few years, and that wouldn’t surprise me. Coding used to take up most of the production time, and now it’s much faster. A plugin that took six months to build might take one month today, at the same quality.
That doesn’t mean the price should be divided by six. But I think it would be fair to pass some of that saved time on to users, especially since they could reverse-engineer it and rebuild it themselves for almost nothing.
At around 20€, I think more people would buy it. It would also stop people from trying to rebuild it, because doing so would cost them more time and money than just buying it.
Hi Hugo!
Thank you for taking the time to frame it in such an interesting way.
You’re right that writing code has gotten a lot cheaper, and that’s clearly starting to redefine the value of a small tool like Fontspan. Keeping this in mind from now on could be key when thinking about where the industry is heading in general.
On the price, looking at it from the perspective you raise, and even though Glyphs is a completely different tool, I think you’re right: Fontspan probably shouldn’t cost a third of what Glyphs costs.
I really appreciate you explaining your reasoning instead of just saying the price feels high, and I also want to thank @SCarewe whose comment also made me notice the price question from his own angle. This kind of feedback is really useful, and I’ll genuinely take your comments into account.
ChatGPT in Work mode is invaluable with Glyphs. It fully integrates and can do anything you ask, including creating new glyphs based on your template, analysis, debugging, testing, writing scripts, plugins, OT feature code etc.
I could be wrong, but your posts have a lot of the telltale signs of being written by AI. You do you but, from a promotional point of view, they make your tool seem like it’s made by AI by proxy. I think you’ll struggle to convince people to pay $100 as a result. Just my opinion though, so feel free to ignore me.
Don’t worry! Thanks for your comment, all feedback is welcome!
English isn’t my native language, so I try to cover that part with translate on AI. I could probably communicate well with my own level of English, but you know, insecurity hahaha Maybe I took communication on the forum very seriously? The $100 cost was great feedback, and I think you all have a point!
The $100 cost was great feedback, and I think you all have a point!