Manual testing

Type designers, even those just starting out, tend to have some kind of test sheet or proofing document process. Proofing templates will sometimes contain common issues that might not yet be accounted for in the typeface.

When you export a new version of your font, you could install it and, and start typing out punctuation-lowercase-punctuation sample strings, and other tricky strings from memory. And while you probably do some of that during the drawing process, it’d be absurd to imagine you’d do that comprehensively, each for each export.

In software development, this might get called “manual testing,” to distinguish it from automated testing.

Manual testing makes sense while you are building—it effectively is part of building. You click the checkout button and ensure something is added to the cart while building a product page in an ecommerce site.

But chances are you aren’t going to do this each time something else changes. When you upgrade some other, seemingly unrelated part of the site, you aren’t necessarily going to be clicking that same checkout button again. It shouldn’t affect things, sure, but as anyone who has ever used any software knows, what we think “should” happen isn’t always what we get—fonts included.

Until next time,
Kenneth