Tobias Frere-Jones Gotham: Working with tables

agostini12 Feb 2008

hi there
I'm currently working on a catalogue for a client of ours.
The used font family is tobias frere-jones' gotham.
It all works fine until i have to create tables with
numbers. None of them seem to line up (as in full-stop
and the numbers). Is there a special version of gotham
to fix this problem, or does anyone know of a good
workaround? Is it possible for me to change the spacing
in the font itself?

Thanks a lot
Jörg

adnix12 Feb 2008#

Contact Hoefler & Frere-Jones. I know they recently released an OpenType version of Gotham late last year, so maybe tabular numbers exist.

David

Scott Leyes12 Feb 2008#

What software application are you using? There are different workarounds for different apps. The first one I can think of is to insert a tab stop before each and every digit/number, and manually set the tabs very close together... a pain, but do-able in a pinch.

agostini12 Feb 2008#

indesign CS3. I thought about using tabs to fix it.
but on the other hand its a 200 page catalogue
with a lot of info. It would drive me mad to use
tabs...
would it be possible to use something like font
lab or similar software to fix the problem
(i don't have the software)

Bert Vanderveen13 Feb 2008#

Change Optical Spacing to Metrics for the tabular matter. That's in the Character Palette, under Typesize.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

Don McCahill13 Feb 2008#

Is there another alternative: choose a font specifically for the tables, and choose one that will have aligning numbers?

agostini13 Feb 2008#

bert - yeah tried this first but unfortunately that doesnt work,
as the fonts spacing is already corrected to the extend that the
numbers won't lineup at all.

don - well i think thats what i have to do...bugger...

Just had an email back from Hoefler & Frere-Jones
(quick as!). They told me there will be a version
available which will fix this, mid-year 2008

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