Hi,
sure, but fonts should be chosen with care .. and illegal ripoffs should be avoided (those cd's with hundreds of fonts, nowadays sites)
See: https://github.com/w0ng/googlefontdirectory
(quality of design / digitization, completeness of coverage, correctness of features ... much can be wrong)
See also: http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/
In that case I'd run a separate font checker, as you never know what users upload. Similar issues can occur with those tagged formats that are in fact linked lists.
That's a good idea. The TTX font tool was going to be my first stop. http://sourceforge.net/projects/fonttools/
sure, although a crash has the nice advantage of knowing that a font (collection) is crap (which i then can blacklist permanently in my mind)
A crash, from a practical point of view, is much easier to deal with than a runaway CPU, which is altogether nasty. (On older systems, if you have only one or two CPUs, it can quite quickly take down a system.) Warm regards.