Typophile

Style-Linking Question from a Newbie

jdusek

Hi, everyone. I’m new to Typophile and I’m hoping some of you can shed some light on a problem I’m having.

I recently purchased a comprehensive OpenType font family that includes a wide range of weights and styles. The problem is that the font designer has not style-linked the font family, so I now have over 40 individual weights and styles that appear in the font menu. Additionally, I can’t take advantage of keyboard shortcuts for bold or italic, and typical OpenType features such as automatic ligatures or alternative sets are not supported.

The font family is beautiful and well-designed, but the absence of style-linking and the lack of OpenType tyographic features makes production a nightmare. It’s incredibly time consuming to change weights, insert special characters or switch between old style and lining figures.

I’m wondering if anyone has experienced this same issue and if there’s anything I can do on my end to make the fonts more manageable. Are there any font management utilities for the Mac that can style-link fonts? I am working primarily in Pages and Keynote, if that has any bearing on the issue.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Stephen Coles

Does Pages have style sheets? For a project like this, it might be worth investing in InDesign. You’ll find that style-linking isn’t widely supported by foundries for a number of reasons. Style sheets will let you switch character or paragraph styles with key commands.

Miguel Sousa

> The font family is beautiful and well-designed, but the absence of style-linking and the lack of OpenType tyographic features makes production a nightmare. I’m wondering [...] if there’s anything I can do on my end to make the fonts more manageable.

Can you go back to the designer/foundry and ask him/them to rework the font family?

> Are there any font management utilities for the Mac that can style-link fonts?

AFAIK, the fonts have to be built in a certain way in order for style-linking to work on the application’s side. I’m not sure that you can achieve that with a font management utility.

Karsten Luecke

OpenType-savvy applications would not need style linking to group members of the same family — a family’s styles will be automatically grouped in the font menu as long as they share the same ’name’ table entry for name-ID16, or name-ID1/Mac in case of Apple’s OSX apps.
(As to bold/italic shortcuts, it is really better to use style sheets and assign shortcuts to them, in case that this is possible in Pages.)

Mark Simonson

I have style linking enabled in Proxima Nova, but Pages and Keynote ignore how it’s set up. The Cocoa text engine (which is used in both programs) seems

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