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Registry of Type Design

A global, human- and machine-readable registry of typefaces and the people who made them - digital and pre-digital, in any script or writing system.

What this is

  • data/people/*.json - one file per person (type designers and other professionals involved in creating typefaces).
  • data/typefaces/*.json - one file per typeface.
  • schema/ - the JSON Schema each record must validate against.

These JSON files are the source of truth and are edited directly via pull request. A build step compiles them into a static site (human-readable pages, a JSON API, CSV/NDJSON bulk dumps, and a search index) published on GitHub Pages.

Identifiers

Every record has a permanent, opaque id (rtd-p-000001 for people, rtd-t-000001 for typefaces) that never changes, separate from its filename/slug (which can change if a record is renamed). Old ids are never deleted or reused; merged/deprecated records resolve to a tombstone page pointing at the current record.

Sourcing policy

Sources must be independent and verifiable. Wikidata, Wikipedia, and any other Wikimedia project may never be used as a source - see CONTRIBUTING.md. This is enforced in CI, not just documentation.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Local development

npm install
npm run validate   # validate data/ against the schemas
npm run build      # compile data/ into dist/

Useful queries

Count people records carrying a given external identifier (needs jq):

# ISNI
jq -s '[.[] | select(.external_ids.isni != null and .external_ids.isni != "")] | length' data/people/*.json

# LC-NAF
jq -s '[.[] | select(.external_ids.lc_naf != null and .external_ids.lc_naf != "")] | length' data/people/*.json

Count Wikidata items carrying an RTD id via the Registry of Type Design ID property (P14791), run at query.wikidata.org or via curl:

SELECT (COUNT(?item) AS ?count) WHERE { ?item wdt:P14791 ?rtdid. }

scripts/sync-wikidata-p14791.js runs this same query as part of a fuller reconciliation between RTD's own wikidata_qid fields and Wikidata's P14791 claims.

License

© Subhashish Panigrahi. Registry data is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 - see LICENSE.

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A global registry of typefaces and the people who made them, digital and pre-digital.

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