Typography-MNIST (TMNIST): an MNIST-Style Image Dataset to Categorize Glyphs and Font-Styles

TL;DR

Typography-MNIST (TMNIST) is a large dataset of grayscale images of glyphs in various font styles, designed to aid research in font design and cognitive readability analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces TMNIST, a comprehensive dataset of over half a million images of glyphs in diverse fonts, supporting font and cognitive readability research.

Findings

Dataset includes 565,292 images of 1,812 glyphs in 1,355 fonts.

Supports research in font design and cognitive readability.

Provides open access to data and generation scripts.

Abstract

We present Typography-MNIST (TMNIST), a dataset comprising of 565,292 MNIST-style grayscale images representing 1,812 unique glyphs in varied styles of 1,355 Google-fonts. The glyph-list contains common characters from over 150 of the modern and historical language scripts with symbol sets, and each font-style represents varying subsets of the total unique glyphs. The dataset has been developed as part of the CognitiveType project which aims to develop eye-tracking tools for real-time mapping of type to cognition and to create computational tools that allow for the easy design of typefaces with cognitive properties such as readability. The dataset and scripts to generate MNIST-style images for glyphs in different font styles are freely available at https://github.com/aiskunks/CognitiveType.