Could you post a list of the different styles? Complete names.... I’m asking because that sounds like a lot of styles for one design.

I think OTF’s are standalone, and you can’t put them in suitcases. Either/or.

OpenType would offer you the ability to reduce the number of styles, maybe substantially. Have you considered combining Small Caps and OSF fonts with the Regular one?

{{OpenType would offer you the ability to reduce the number of styles, maybe
substantially. Have you considered combining Small Caps and OSF fonts with the Regular
one?}}
I don’t know what you mean?

Here’s a list of all the styles, I’ll seperate them into the catagories I would ultimately like them in.

Garamond
Garamond Bold
Garamond Bold Condensed
Garamond Bol Con Italic
Garamond Bol Ita
Garamond Book
Garamond Book Con
Garamond Book Con Ita
Garamond Book Ita
Garamond Book Small Caps
Garamond Light
Garamond Lig Con
Garamond Lig Con Ita
Garamond Lig Ita
Garamond Ultra
Garamond Ult Con
Garamond Ult Con Ita
Garamond Ult Ita

Garamond Three
Garamond Thr
Garamond Thr Bol
Garamond Thr Bol Ita
Garamond Thr Bol Ita Old Style Figures
Garamond Thr Bold SC
Garamond Thr Ita
Garamond Thr Ita OSF
Garamond Thr SC

Garamond Narrow
Garamond Nar
Garamond Nar Bol
Garamond Nar Bol Ita
Garamond Nar Ita

Garamond Reprise
Garamond Rep Bol SC OSF
Garamond Rep Ita OSF

Now, I’ve tried breaking these into smaller catagories, but I still get the same problem when the families are over the four different kinds of styles. Even when I make sure each one is unique and written the correct way the stupid generator tells me I have identical styles. Thanks for your help. You really want the birthday cards, huh?

Ah, I see.

These Garamonds are from different families, even though they are all named Garamond. Have you seen samples or specimens of these?

I wonder what the final result is suposed to be: will you distribute the fonts to your organization, or keep them for your use, or...? I ask because you might not need to go through all these steps if your goal is simply to use them on your own machine. Also, re-combining them may be unnecessary....

It looks from the font names like you are trying to combine 3 or 4 different families of Garamonds. ITC Garamond, which it looks like you have, is very different from Adobe Garamond and that is noticeably different from Garamond Three, which you also have. So you may want to seek out the original install discs of these fonts to see where they came from and how they were grouped originally. That may explain why they appeared in the font menu in more than one place, and why you received them in sub categories. They are different.

I’ve attached a gif showing a variety of the available Garamonds (just the romans, regular or book weight). You can see that some of them would not work very well together (visually) if you had them all in the same suitcase. Since you have been assigned to be the font guy there, you may want to become familiar with these. Be advised, however, that this is the tiny tip of a gigantic iceberg; if you don’t want a new obsession to take over your other work, you might have to tell your boss to find another font guy or gal. Figuring out the different Garamonds is a good first task to attempt; if you don’t have the patience or interest for it then you may not be a type nerd like me.

In your list there are some small cap and Oldstyle figure fonts (end with OSF or SC). They are separate fonts from the Regular ones. In PostScript we always had to choose between small caps and lowercase because you could only ever have 256 characters in a font. You can use them together, but you have to mix them in your document, like epoxy. OpenType is a new format that allows much larger character sets, which means the small caps, oldstyle figures, alternates, ligatures, etc. that are part of a single style (Roman, for example) can all go in one file. That would clean up your font list a lot. However you cannot group all the characters from the Bold Condensed in the main Bold OpenType font. Each style has its own font. And of course you would not put the characters from ITC Garamond in a file with the Adobe Garamond. You would have a revolt on your hands! ;)

There are some books you might like to have to help with this:

How To Boss Your Fonts Around, by Robin Williams,
Anatomy of a Typeface, by Alexander Lawson,
Thinking With Type, A critical Guide... By Ellen Lupton
The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst

There are others, maybe some other typophiles will recommend. There are other books listed in the typowiki as well.

Now, I haven’t really solved the problem you wrote about. I didn’t ask which version of FontLab, or platform, but I think I should suggest you check the FontLab site for support info (there’s a forum to visit), since the problem you’re having could be a bug. The newer version of FL (5.02) seems to be more stable than the previous one. I realize the FontInfo window in FL is a hornet’s nest, and managing a lot of styles from FL is likely to make anyone cry, So don’t get too burned up.

Another option is to employ a font management program, and there’s a great new free one out from Linotype: FontExplorer X. I am not sure, and others can chime in here, but I think it might have the ability to organize and re-unite font families. That could solve the problem for the whole office, without cost. Just an idea.

Birthday cards sound nice, but I’d rather that you have a good experience with your fonts and keep your boss happy.

AFAIK, a family with both Regular and Book won’t work in InDesign, so watch out...

Awesome, thank you so much. I was starting to suspect that I’d have to totally submerse myself in this font stuff to ever get a real grasp on it. It looks like my worst fears have been realized. It’s time I become a type-nerd.
Now, I’m working on Fontlab 5.0.2, and I understand you can make a single opentype font that is many characters deep. However, I don’t see how you make them. Is that what glyph generating does? And once you do generate some glyphs, i.e. “A.smcp;B.smcp;C.smcp...” how do you toggle between those when you’re in another program like InDesign?
Maybe I should tackle a smaller font family first, like the Garamond Books. If I have each style in Fontlab 5 and they’re all seperated and I have them saved as vfb’s or seperate otf’s or whatever I need to save them as, how do I get them to combine into one file that can be dropped into Extensis Suitcase and turned on so that all programs can use it? Does that make sense? It does to me, but I’m not sure I’m sane anymore.

Also, I was also starting to see that book and regular Garamonds wouldn’t work together, so thank you Miguel. You’ve saved me another entire eight hour shift of complete frustration.
Tell me, do you guys dream about font vectors? Because I do. And it sucks.

Thanks again for everyone’s help. And I really am having fun.

The use of these fonts will be for distribution among the company. I think some of the design and layout people were tired of having to completely switch fonts instead of being able to pull down a list of only Garamonds. So, yeah, to answer the initial question, not for personal use.

I think the posts were extremely well done. But did the company at least think about buying the opentype version of those different Garamond fonts?
It’s good to learn in this way, but you first have to check what the license agreement of the foundries says.
And it’s also interesting to take a deep look at the very last fonts (or fonts versions) to understand the secret of making things work :)

Good point, Elena.
And Noah, considering the time you’ve already spent (plus the extra one you’ll still need), It’s probably much cheaper to just buy the fonts. In addition you know they’ll work properly.

Developing fonts is no state secret, but don’t expect to learn it overnight. And font development is getting more and more complex every day, as new functionalities are added to the font files.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone here knows how much work this is turning out to be. They gave me this as a sort of side project to my normal workflow and it’s really stressing me out. I’ve learned a ton of info really quickly, but it’s frying my brain just thinking about starting over and making three key fonts now for the ITC, 3 and normal versions of Garamond just so I can reproduce all the styles for each one. So, tell me, how does one buy an open-type font? And how can I be sure it’s going to work on every platform, like InD CS2 and Illustrator CS2 as well as Mac OS9 and OS10?
And thanks, everybody, for not making me feel too stupid here. It’s probably annoying to see some new guy faining ignorance while asking advanced questions that are obviously out of his depth. I’m glad I found this forum.

A ha, new question. so, I’m starting from scratch, running through each fonts information, and I come to the copyright info which, for Garamond 3 regular, is reading “Adobe Systems Incorporated” and I’m thinking that this may have a huge role in my problem. If I’m working with Adobe fonts and trying to get them to work with fonts copyrighted by someone else on the ITC Garamond end, will that hinder my ability to get them all harmonized?

I am not really sure what you mean by the last post. Only thing that comes to my mind is that (as far as I know) ITC does not allow any modification of their fonts. ;-)

About licensing fonts: I’d suggest that you decide which one of these Garamonds you want, and then get it from the foundry which made it. It seems you need to ask for site licenses if you will use them among a company.

I’m sure we’ve got the liscencing, that’s not really my issue. My problem is that I don’t know what I’m doing, but everytime I mess around with it, I get something new. Like, the set of fonts my boss gave me seems to be a mixture of some ITC’s and then the standard Adobe fonts, which I now see will never mix, and all of them are post-scrypt fonts. There’s two major issues there. One, he asked me to make a set of Open Type fonts out of these post-script fonts to match this Small Caps OpenType Garamond we have. Two, I have no idea what the hell that means. I thought I could just stick it all into Fontlab, regenerate them as Open-Types, and tthey’d naturally group themselves together in InD CS2.

A-ha!

It may be that you don’t know what you’re doing, but your boss really doesn’t know. It isn’t worth your or your boss’ time ( = Money ) for you to try to make OpenType fonts from what you have.

1. It’s MUCH harder than you are prepared for - weeks and weeks of tedious work you’ve never done before

2. The typefaces you are starting with aren’t that versatile or useful anyway (ITC Garamond is only useful for a very dated kind of display work, no text)

3. The problem is easily solved by licensing well-made OpenType fonts for your whole company. OpenType fonts are cross-platform and can be installed on Macs or PCs. Same file goes to anyone. Professionally-made OpenType fonts will have appropriate kerning, encodings, character sets, and functional OpenType features which are useful to you when using InDesign or Illustrator. Worth the money.

Consider conferring with the design people in the company and see if there’s any consensus on what typefaces they would want. Choose one serif and one sans family, license them, distribute them and declare them corporate typefaces. Delete the others and join the 21st century. Then you can get back to your regular work.

Versatile, workhorse OpenType Pro serif types:

Bembo Book Pro
Adobe Garamond Pro
Adobe Garamond Premier Pro (a different design from Adobe Garamond with more size variants)
Minion Pro
Adobe Caslon Pro
Galliard Pro
Utopia Pro
ITC Charter Pro

Versatile, workhorse OpenType Pro sans fonts:
Myriad Pro
Meta Pro
Gill Sans Pro

And superfamilies with harmonious Serif and Sans variants (can’t go wrong here):

Legacy Serif and Sans Pro
Mentor Serif and Sans Pro
Absara Serif and Sans OpenType
Freight Text and Sans OpenType

Best of luck!