FontAgent’s FontDNA™ engine maintains font integrity, exposes font metadata and produces digital fingerprints for each of your fonts to uniquely identify them and eliminate duplicates.
About FontDNA
When you import fonts into a FontAgent® client running on Mac or Windows, its FontDNA engine examines the font’s contents in fine detail to:
- Test font integrity
- Identify font metadata
- Produce digital fingerprints that uniquely identify the fonts
FontAgent Server stores unique fonts in its database and prevents the risk of allowing duplicate fonts.
Testing Font Integrity
When you import fonts into a FontAgent client running on Mac or Windows, the FontDNA integrity engine examines the font’s contents in fine detail. It rigorously tests the structure and completeness of the font to make sure it follows industry standards. When a font fails to meet those standards, it is considered corrupt because of the risk that it will render incorrectly in applications and documents, as well as potentially cause performance problems and application and system instability.
Identifying Font Metadata
After testing the integrity of fonts, FontDNA parses and stores all of the fonts’s descriptive metadata and quantitative metrics in the FontAgent Server database. FontAgent clients make this detailed information available so users can view, sort and search fonts on their computers.
Font Metadata Examples
Font name
Font style
Font family
Font type (file format)
Font foundry
Font designer
Version number
Proportion metric
Weight metric
Slant metric
Activation status
Auto-activation status
Font file name
File size
Modification date
Copyright details
Trademark details
… and more
Fingerprinting Fonts
As part of the font-import process, FontDNA creates a unique digital fingerprint based to uniquely identify each font. This rigorous process ensures that users and projects requesting specific fonts get precisely the right font they require and not a font that a close cousin or near stranger. This level of precision is crucial in design and print environments when having the wrong font—even one that is close in structure or appearance—can cause design, production and printing errors that trigger enormous economic costs and losses.
Eliminating Duplicate Fonts
FontAgent clients and servers use FontDNA fingerprints to avoid the risks and inefficiencies of duplicate fonts. So they store unique fonts just once and permit those fonts to be associated with any number of sets. This enables admins and users to support the projects and teams they require while maintaining the highest levels of font integrity.