TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Sat Jul 2 18:05:32 EDT 2022

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LUC DEVROYE


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Linotype web site

It is really not for me to complain about any web site, as mine is about as ugly as they come. But my gripes with the Linotype site over the years have been building up, and today, they have come to a boil. Here we go, for the benefit of Linotype:

  • The last straw is the addition of a password to access the regular site. You have to cancel two passwords before you can access the site now. Why? Does Linotype really want to sell fonts, or keep the buyers at bay?
  • Crashes: Netscape crashes on the Lino page. Mozilla, Safari and Firefox make it through.
  • Search engines cannot find your internal pages. This is a problem with most commercial web sites, but it seriously reduces your hit count and your sales. With the new URL structure at Linotype, this seems to have been fixed. MyFonts shows how to do it right. Openness to the web is a must.
  • Speed: it takes forever to load a Lino page. I am sure there is some heavy processing going on in there, but please, if Google can handle a world wide web query in less than a second, and Amazon can search its twenty million records in half a second, then Linotype should be able to handle a page load in less than ten seconds---thirty to fourty seconds is unacceptable.
  • Commercialism: Do not try to show your entire site in side bars on every page. Most visitors know what they want. Again, follow the MyFonts model.
  • The one that hits me personally is that internal Linotype URL's change all the time. They have changed three times in three years. Bookmarking certain things at Linotype is thus useless. For people like me, who would love to direct traffic to Linotype via link pages, a stable internal URL structure with lifespans measured in decades, not years, is essential. Adobe suffers from similar problems, while MyFonts has just introduced the first change in five years. Agfa, like Linotype, is hopeless. The role model here is Identifont (no change ever). Noteworthy too is that my own pages, as awful as they are, have never changed internal URL organization, and hopefully never will.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Linotype web site
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS













Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html