# Fontalog

> Fontalog is the world's biggest indexed font database — roughly 3.55 million fonts that can be searched by *visual characteristics* (weight, proportion, contrast, xHeight) rather than by name alone. It is made by the team behind FontBase.

Fontalog is a lookup and discovery tool, not a font shop or a download site. It hosts no font files: every font remains the property of its respective owner, and the site links onward to foundries and designers instead of distributing their work.

Every font in the database is measured, not tagged by hand. Fonts are analyzed locally inside the FontBase app with opentype.js: text is rendered off-canvas and key metrics are measured — stroke width, the difference between thick and thin strokes, the height of "x" relative to the capitals, letter width relative to height, and the size of "i" relative to "w". Those measurements become the four search parameters. The font's naming table supplies name, family, style and foundry. No font files are ever uploaded to Fontalog's servers.

## The four visual parameters

Each is a number from 0 to 1, and each is searched as a *range*.

- **Weight** — how heavy the strokes are. 0 = hairline, 1 = ultra black.
- **Proportion** — how wide the letters are relative to their height. 0 = very condensed, 1 = very extended.
- **Contrast** — how much stroke thickness varies within a letter. 0 = monolinear (most sans-serifs), 1 = high contrast (Didone-style serifs).
- **xHeight** — the height of lowercase letters relative to the capitals. 0 = small x-height, 1 = large x-height.

## Pages

- [Home](https://fontalog.xyz): what Fontalog is, plus a search form and a selection of featured fonts.
- [Search](https://fontalog.xyz/search): the main interface. All filters live in the URL query string, so any search is a shareable, linkable URL.
- [Font detail](https://fontalog.xyz/font/Helvetica): one page per font at `/font/{postScriptName}` (PostScript name, URL-encoded). Shows the font name, family, style, date added, its four measured values, publisher and designer with links, a list of similar fonts, and an explanation of the methodology.
- [Sitemap](https://fontalog.xyz/sitemap-index.xml): index of crawlable URLs.

## How to build a search URL

Base: `https://fontalog.xyz/search`

Text filters (substring match, all optional):

- `n` — font name, e.g. `n=grotesk`
- `f` — family name, e.g. `f=Helvetica%20Neue`
- `s` — style / subfamily, e.g. `s=Bold%20Italic`
- `m` — foundry / manufacturer, e.g. `m=TypeType`

Range filters, written as `min-max` with values between 0 and 1. Omit a parameter to leave it unconstrained (equivalent to `0-1`):

- `w` — weight, e.g. `w=0.6-0.8`
- `p` — proportion, e.g. `p=0.2-0.4`
- `c` — contrast, e.g. `c=0.7-1`
- `x` — xHeight, e.g. `x=0.5-0.65`

Worked examples:

- Heavy condensed fonts: `https://fontalog.xyz/search?w=0.75-1&p=0-0.3`
- Low-contrast fonts with a large x-height: `https://fontalog.xyz/search?c=0-0.15&x=0.6-1`
- Everything one foundry published in an italic style: `https://fontalog.xyz/search?m=TypeType&s=Italic`
- Fonts visually near a specific one: open its `/font/{postScriptName}` page and use the "Similar fonts" list, or the parameter links next to each measured value, which pre-fill a ±0.04 range around that font's numbers.

## Tools for in-browser agents (WebMCP)

If you are an agent running inside the browser, every page registers WebMCP tools
(https://webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/) — call these instead of scraping the page:

- `search_fonts` — search by the four visual ranges and by name, family, style or foundry. On the search page it also updates what the user is looking at.
- `get_font_details` — everything known about one font, by PostScript name.
- `find_similar_fonts` — fonts within ±0.04 on all four characteristics.
- `open_font_page` — navigate to a font's page.

## Font previews

Each font's specimen image is served from `https://previews.fontba.se/{postScriptName}/aa`, URL-encoding the PostScript name. The trailing segment is a fixed sample; other strings are not available. The image is a mask (alpha silhouette), so it is drawn in the page's current text color rather than as a standalone picture.

## Limits and etiquette

- A search returns at most 500 fonts. This is a hard cap, not a page size — narrow the filters to reach the fonts you want rather than paging through everything.
- Requests are rate-limited to roughly one per second. Please stay under that.
- Fontalog offers no font downloads and no public data-export API. Link to font pages instead of scraping the catalog.
- Results are not exhaustive or infallible. Measurements are derived from outlines, and metadata comes from each font's own naming table, so it can be incomplete or wrong.

## Contact

- Corrections, missing information, foundry or designer claims, and removal requests: fontalog@fontba.se (the "Report" and "Claim" buttons on every font page).
- Made by [FontBase](https://fontba.se), a font manager for macOS, Windows and Linux.