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Big Caslon.dfont & Creative Suite

lettertiep17 Feb 2004

I've been toying around with the new illustrator CS and its Opentype capabilities.

Works very, very nice with Adobe Pro fonts, but Illustrator doesn't recognize the OT features of the .dfonts, that came with Panther, like Big Caslon. Only if you insert manually with the Glyph Palette. But I can hardy call that "user-friendly".

Example: if you specify Small Caps in Illustrator with Big Caslon, it gives you scaled capitals (aaaaaargh). It works in TextEdit tough. But on the other hand, TextEdit can't cope with the Adobe Pro-fonts...

I tought that Opentype would end all this misery ?

eolson17 Feb 2004#

Are .dfonts OpenType?

lettertiep17 Feb 2004#

I tought so,
Apple's own flavour :-)

kakaze17 Feb 2004#

What I want to know, is why did it take apple almost 20 years to finally place actual font data in the data fork instead of in the resource fork?

hrant17 Feb 2004#

Deluded ideology.

hhp

johnbutler17 Feb 2004#

.dfonts are Apple-style Truetype fonts with the resource data moved to the data fork. They are slightly different in structure than .ttf fonts, though both are data fork Truetype. .dfonts can but generally don't contain OpenType tables. Apple built the format purely out of necessity, because the Mac OS X build process requires files with all data accessible on a Unix filesystem, which doesn't have resource forks.

Resource forks are an ideological issue among programmers. Personally I think they're dumb and Steve did good to make OS X work on filesystems without them, whether or not he wanted to.

Big Caslon, Skia, Apple Chancery and some other Apple system fonts are AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) fonts. AAT used to be called GX. The only way you can use their features is in AAT-savvy apps, which includes TextEdit and Keynote on Panther systems, and WorldText on pre-Panther systems. To get those features in InDesign, do the text in TextEdit, export it as a PDF, and import the PDF into InDesign or Illustrator or whatever. Awkward, ja? It's generally only useful for headlines.

kakaze17 Feb 2004#

"Resource forks are an ideological issue among programmers. Personally I think they're dumb and Steve did good to make OS X work on filesystems without them, whether or not he wanted to."

Hear hear! Resource forks are a ridiculous idea, especially in a world where only one computer system uses them. Whoever was in charge of that idea should be shot.

lettertiep18 Feb 2004#

I see...

thanx for demystifying this issue.

puffinry18 Feb 2004#

Is there any reason that AAT tables can

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