At the risk of alienating at least some of the type designers and vendors at Typhophile, I’d like to start a discussion about “unprofessional” fonts from “professional” designers. In the last few years I’ve purchased at least 4 font families from well regarded designers and vendors, and paid no less than $125 for each of them that included from 4 to 20 fonts that I had to “fix” in order for the fonts to be useable. I don’t know why I want to protect the guilty, but I’d rather not name the fonts or the designers.
Without getting into a debate about Windows naming conventions (R/I/B/BI), two of the font families were not named as a family, e.g., their names were Fontname Regular, Fontname Italic, etc, so that you could not apply the I/B/BI attributes (in a word processing program, e.g.) to call up the appropriate font. There may be some reason for this for some people in special fields using special software, but for the rest of us, its a PITA.
The other two font families were internally mislabeled (I don’t remember exactly how, but something like) the family name was correct but the attributes were misapplied (i.e., the regular was labeled as italic).
What’s with this? How may others have had similar problems? Why does this happen?
If this happens to you, and you can’t or don’t want to correct this on your own, what’s your recourse? If you’ve tried to deal with the designer or vendor about this kind of issue, have you had any luck?
