Type Specimen is a free iPad app to visually browse the fonts of the Czech Suitcase Type Foundry. It can be used to select fonts for projects - be it magazine design, corporate identity design, web applications, or book typesetting. Type Specimen allows you to categorize individual fonts, make comparisons, or see details of specific glyphs.

Each font has an example of its family typeface on its page, a listing of all available styles, a magnifiable preview of all available glyphs in the specific font set, and detailed written information about the origin of the typeface, technical details, or its OpenType features.

All important information about fonts, language support and compatible applications in one place. The section also contains information about OpenType features, which are standard among our fonts and which let you take advantage of the full potential of current typography. You can sort all font styles into predetermined classification groups or according to defined shape characteristics through a simple search interface. Full-text searching in the names and styles is available.

The combine function is a nice way of finding appropriate combinations of fonts without having to install a single font into your computer. Select Headline, Subhead or Text in the drop-down menu, choose the typeface you like and move the fields around to find suitable combinations, or browse through a number of preset combinations. Or let yourself be surprised with a random combination using the Shuffle button.

Currently the app is limited to fonts of the Suitcase Type Foundry. So it’s kind of like their shining new interactive font brochure. Maybe it would be nice to open this to other foundries or to be able to load fonts from a local computer. This would make great functions like the combine feature more useful. But maybe that’s an option for a future version of Type Specimen.

More information: http://www.suitcasetype.com/app.php

Free App Store download