Q:

Looking fo a free type specimen book creator for Windows

I'm looking for a Windows-running equivalent of Veenix TypeBook Creator. I want to batch print a paragraph of text (not a simple phrase or pangram but a real paragraph) for a large amount of fonts (type 1 and OTF): one font/style = one paragraph.
I've seen lots of softwares, but they have either severe limitations, or are expensive, or runs only on Macs. The amount of type manager software is really massive; any help would be appreciated to find the good one.

A:

How about doing it with a Shell or Batch script which makes use of LaTeX and Pandoc?
Once you have LaTeX and Pandoc installed and have your paragraph's text in a text file called mytext.txt, you could do this:
for i in ${HOME}/myfonts/*.ttf ; do
    pandoc                                                           \
       -o testpage-$(basename "${i}").pdf                            \
       -V geometry:"margin=1.5cm, paperwidth=21cm, paperheight=12cm" \
       -V mainfont="${i}"                                            \
       --latex-engine=lualatex                                       \
          mytext.txt ;
done

This would give you a 1-page PDF file for each font. Then concatenate these PDFs with the help of pdftk:
 pdftk testpage-*.pdf cat output font-specimen-book.pdf  

