Font Census

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

The intent of this project is to take a font census, i.e. find out which fonts are popular that you can count on being pre-installed for CSS style sheets or Java to use. Why? If programmers and HTML designers knew better which fonts are pre-installed, they could produce more varied font choices in style sheets and Applets.

This program is an extension to the FontShower Project. You might start with that and modify it.

This project’s job it to take poll of which fonts various sites are using and compile the data producing a report sorted by percent of sites with that font installed. It would would look like this.

You would implement it by converting FontShower to a Java Web Start app. It would display fonts to anyone in the outside world. It would also send a list of installed fonts to the server. The server would save the raw data keyed by IP. If the same IP sends more data, you replace the old information.

Periodically you read the entire database counting how many IPs there are and how many times each font appears. Then you produce your table. You might do this once a day and generate HTML for curious viewers to see. You could handle this with a database, or with a simple linear log with timestamped entries.

Alternatively, you might maintain the totals as each report comes in and generate each request to see the report with JSP. You might do this with an in-RAM HashMap that you back up to disk every once in a while.

font finder project
Fonts
FontShower amanuensis
FontShower project
Proofreader Font project
Reuters Unicode Displayer

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