I was about to say, you better not be talking about the letterforms... I own Verlag, Gotham, Hoefler and Didot. They work just fine for me. Can't really say I know about Whitney specifically.

Does it just not show up, or does it work in the text palate at least? How I usually create Paragraph styles is to manually configure a text block with the attributes I want, then with it highlighted, create a new paragraph style. That new paragraph style should be automatically created with all the attributes that are highlighted. The only other things I can think of is if you have a character style overriding it or the Paragraph style is based on another Paragraph style. Probably not though, if the H&FJ tech department admits it's an issue.

Hope this helps?

I can make the same thing happen here, and create similar problems with big families from other foundries, too. I think that this problem is caused by mixing fonts with specific names for each of their weights, e.g. condensed italic or book italic. There’s nothing wrong with the fonts themselves, it’s just a byproduct of complex typesetting.

Hi Koop,

I believe my colleagues Jonathan and Ksenya here at H&FJ have been in contact with you, but I'd like to follow up with a bit of background about the problem you're experiencing.

When you switch between font families in an Adobe application, the application does its best to match up font weights and styles from one font family to another. Maybe Eric Menninga on the InDesign team can give a little more information about this, but I believe InDesign uses a hard-coded internal list of style names to know which styles to match up.

For instance (and I believe this is the problem you're experiencing), if you set a paragraph with Times Regular and Times Italic and then switch the entire paragraph to the Whitney family, Adobe's internal style name list is able to deduce that "Regular" is the same weight as "Book" and properly switches to Whitney Book, but it doesn't make the connection that "Italic" should transpose to "Book Italic".

The Italics in Whitney are style linked with the Romans -- you can still select some text and type command-shift-i and the font will switch to the proper italic -- it's only when blindly switching an entire paragraph of styled text from one font family to another that this problem would come up. This isn't isolated to just Whitney, we can confirm that the same problem occurs with fonts from other vendors that use "Book" and "Book Italic" as style names including fonts from Adobe. You'll find that the same thing happens with Meta Book Italic and Adobe Futura Book Italic, among others.

I'm sorry that this is still causing you trouble, but I hope this explanation helps shed a little more light on the subject. Maybe Eric, Miguel or Thomas from Adobe might chime in a bit on this and give a little bit of a different perspective.

Andy

I think to use the word "suck" is altogether too harsh. Yes it sucks that there is a problem in naming that many large families experience, but it is not fair to call out Jonathan and his foundry in this way. Can you please re-title the thread to something more along the lines of "Having trouble getting italics to work in InDesign"?

And just to try to suck even less I'm submitting this problem on Adobe's "Feature Request / Bug Report" form which I would suggest others should do too if you think Adobe apps should recognize that the style name "Book Italic" matches up with "Italic" when switching between font families.

Andy

If type foundries were smart, they'd avoid this kind of issue by restricting type families to Roman, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic -- just like Microsoft!

"I think to use the word “suck” is altogether too harsh."

In the world of software, 'suck' is hardly the worst way to describe things. ;o)

Well, for those of us of a certain age use of the word 'sucks' in that fashion is also a depressing example of the increasing vulgarity of public discourse.

One thing i know is Andy's customer service does not suck. Way to go above and beyond.

I understand the problem now, i have had that happen before, it's kinda like how Starbucks has Talls instead of smalls. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard for adobe to group OBLIQUE, SLANTED and ITALIC as the same characteristic, or cross-reference the weights BOOK or ROMAN with REGULAR. However, if the foundary decided to be jerks and call the style/weight something absurd like "french toast," then yeah, that would be dumb.

wow! thanks' for all your amazing feedback especially andyclymer, you definitely went above and beyond on this matter on your explanation. I now understand what is going on, I was just very frustrated and thats why the word "suck" was in the title. I meant for "suck" to be describing my frustration and not the foundry at all, they have been amazing with their support. I did change the title of the post by removing the word suck as it is a bit harsh. I appreciate you submitting this report to Adobe Andy, you are a great person. I am in complete awe that Adobe has not made this simple correction? it would make many life's simpler, that is why they created paragraph and character styles, right.
Again, thank's for the amazing feedback.

I am in complete awe that Adobe has not made this simple correction?

It’s not so simple. Naming conventions vary wildly, and if Adobe changes the way it’s handled to work with one set of names something else will break. Indesign can’t be perfect because it doesn’t exist in a perfect world.

vulgarity of public

LOL!