Fonts, fonts and more fonts


What you have to say

 

Bill's Bible.

Our knowledge is small but over the years support questions tend to leave some general impressions. The impressions are unscientific and subject to correction.

1. Fonts that have been in the system through several system updates always seemed to be more likely to cause problems.
2. Sometimes removing fonts from the system and then putting them back has the appearance of fixing problems. Nobody knows why.
3. Very old fonts have a high likelihood of causing problems. The date of importance identified by Adobe seems to be 1992.
4. A bad font may crash PC on OS X.
5. Early fonts were designed with a small memory footprint. The system fabricated styles. The screen and printed length was almost never the same when styles were used.
6. Font substituted at print time creates screen and printed differences.
7. There has been a continuing shift in the design of fonts as larger memory footprints have become available.
8. Fonts designed in the mid nineties were sometimes designed with a midrange memory footprint.
9. Recently designed fonts are likely to contain considerably more information such as a font for each style. The memory footprint will also be larger.
10. Condensed and extended styles are likely to have screen length inaccuracies. Many fonts are lacking a condensed/extend font and the system must fabricate a reasonable result.
11. Italic as a font style is subject to screen length inaccuracies.
12. At least one Adobe font that worked well under 9 did not have any styles when used with X. No error messages were presented. Adobe had a replacement that works with X.
13. Adobe Type Manager use under X is unknown.
14. Fonts for 9 appear to be found by X. How is a mystery?
15. There are many locations that fonts are installed. The location is probably important in determining how the font works.
16. Questionable fonts are known to cause slow menu drop down.
17. Multiple Master (Mac OS X 10.2 and later only) seems to be the latest type of font.

Bill Stanley
Posted:June 02, 2003

Ralph's Addendum

Concerning a couple of items I add a couple of notes:

13. Adobe Type Manager will never exist for OS X. Apple has included their own type engine which generates all type EXCEPT I believe Adobe's graphic engine (part of all or most of their apps now) does its own RIPing.

17. Actually OpenType fonts are the latest type available. While Multiple Master typefaces work under OS 10.2 and greater and they are still available from Adobe, I do not believe there will be any further development from Adobe and all of their original faces which are available in MM are being reissued in OpenType. OpenType is great - except its implementation varies from application to application - even in Adobe apps. The real shame is that Apple's GX fonts never made it. The contained everything OpenType does and a whole lot more - Apple was just years late in getting the technology out so it died.

Ralph Richards
Posted: June 02, 2003

 

 

Watch out for conflicting names!

Greg's Story

I had a font issue with regard to the move to OSx - I might as well share it in case it is helpful to anybody else.

I had two font familys installed of the same font in different styles. These were truetype suitcases that contained the same font in different styles, one suitcase was an outline version, and the other a solid version of the same face. These font were behaving strangely, sometimes only one of them was showing up in the font menu, and it only yielded helvetica when chosen, other times they did not show at all. Picking it would crash some programs. Existing documents that had this face in it would open up with all the characters showing squares. Both faces work perfectly well in classic and previously in OS9.

As it turned out both faces had been given the same "menu" name - internally fonts have a name which appears in the font menu - and that was causing the trouble.

I fixed this with Fontographer and regenerated the faces and rebuilt the familys, and now they operate perfectly, with the styles in a pop-out menu from the font menu, and appearing in the listing in the system font dialog.

Greg La Vardera
Posted: May 20, 2003

 

 

Multiple Masters on the slide?

Ralph gives some insight:

Originally OS X would not work with MM fonts. Later revisions, perhaps 10.2 ALLOW multiple master fonts but it seems like the individual application has to deal with it. In this respect I have found that only SOME of Adobe applications work correctly and the fonts must be placed in a specific folder to work correctly - I know the applications own font folder works for Adobe InDesign.

Unfortunately (I believe) multiple master fonts are being phased out because of incompatibilities with print drivers, especially at print shops.

The new font format is OpenType. As I understand it there is something akin to a wrapper which contains lots of information in addition to the actual character definitions, and then embedded in the file is either a TrueType or Type One face - usually with LOTS of extra characters. Adobe is releasing OpenType versions of all of its multiple master typefaces. You lose the incredible ability to "morph" a typeface in variations such as weight or optical size, but OpenType carries a tremendous amount of information which allows aware programs to have wonderful ligatures and extra glyphs. At the present time few applications take full advantage of OpenType and even Adobe's applications outside of InDesign are rather poor. I've done some layout work in InDesign because of its incredible control over typography but then have been unable to transfer the work to Illustrator.

Hopefully the situation will improve with time, but I still lament the loss of multiple master typefaces.

I apologize if any of this information is incorrect or misleading. It has been a while since I immersed myself in lots of typography work. [We'll forgive you this time Ralph. ed]

Cheers,
Ralph

Ralph Richards
Posted: May 15, 2003