It is probably okay, but not officially recommended. I'm not aware of any situation in which it would break, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some piece of software out there with an in-built assumption that all font names contain only A-Z and a-z.

We took the risk many years ago, including numerals in a font name (Garamond 1530) and didn't run into any problems, but I noticed that even fairly recently when Adobe were experimenting with naming optical masters by explicit size they spelled out the numbers, e.g. 'ten' instead of '10'.

Once, when mastering a large set of fonts for a client, I came across # in a font name, and my recommendation to the client was that we should get rid of this. One simply doesn't know what problems a character like # or & might cause.

So I'm not necessarily saying that you should play it safe, but if you wanted to play it safe, you would avoid &.

Thanks John! I'll mull it over a while now that I have your sage advice.

ChrisL

David Berlow has also had problems with numerals, apparently.

I would avoid the ampersand... unless you think it will help sales!

hhp

It's a bad idea. In Windows, application menu captions are written in a way that ampersands precedes the letter that gets the menu keyboard shortcut assigned. So if the source code of the application says "&Open" and "S&ave as...", the menu will have "O" in Open and "a" in "Save as" underlined, and those letters will work as keyboard shortcuts.

Depending on how cleanly a programmer has written the code, it may happen that the same is applied to font names displayed in the menu. So if you name your font "Black&White", the user may actually see "BlackWhite" with "W" underlined, which will obviously be nonsense.

Definitely avoid unless there is a *VERY* compelling reason to use it and/or you enjoy doing tech support. All punctuation and non-ASCII alphabetics should be avoided, really, as many of them are reserved or have special meaning in different contexts (i.e. '/', '\' in filesystems, '&', '<', '>', ';' and others in HTML, etc.).

I'll jump on the bad idea bandwagon. Or at least, it's a risk, and it will almost certainly cause problems *somewhere*.

Cheers,

T

Thanks to all of our unanimous posters, it seems the verdict is in. Guess I will scrap that idea.
What happened to faces like Univers that had a numbering system, 45, 55, 65, etc.. Did they flake out along the way or do weight names work while family names don't?

ChrisL

Numbers for weights and names work just fine—some versions of Univers use them, as does Museo, and right now I’m having no trouble using them in a series of interpolated fonts that I’m testing.

How about switching "&" for "and" in file names only? Promotional material won't cause any problems.

I might do that, Frode, thanks!

ChrisL

How about switching “&” for “and” in file names only?

Don’t use special characters (or spaces) in file names. The sorts of reserved uses that Adam described for Windows menus can also apply to other areas of programming. Operating systems might handle them, but I’ve run into software that was not coded to anticipate filenames with special characters or spaces and starts misbehaving. It gets especially bad once the files end up on a CD/DVD, where the mastering software may not be capable of dealing with nonstandard filenames but will burn something to disc anyway, without ever raising an error.

This is a surprisingly really interesting thread! hah good to know this stuff

- Scott

I wonder if Arabic and Indic scripts have similar issues?

ChrisL

I just wanted to reiterate not to use & in the font name, meaning the file names, postscript name and whatever name will be seen by the system. Such special characters in Linux often make life more difficult on the command line. The ampersand, for instance, stops the command at that character, and puts whatever was called into the background. One can always remedy this by writing \& for &, but it always is frustrating to have to go through long internet addresses and pick out the special characters, for example.
Also, in Xe(La)TeX one has to declare the font in the document using the full name installed on the machine. An ampersand here would be seen as a misplaced alignment character, and I would just have to hope that \& would remedy it.

chris,
as the old adage goes: 'don't knock it until you've tried it'. but saying that you might have to 'try it' under a load of applications to make sure there are no problems. i guess it's basic cost/benefit analysis to figure out if the payoff will be worth the hassle.

Paul, Thanks! It does not seem likely to boost sales more than a fraction of what headaches it might bring :-)

ChrisL

I wonder if Arabic and Indic scripts have similar issues?

In what sense?

John, what I mean is, Since they have more glyphs and some are combining characters, would this break some software if combing characters were used in a font name.

ChrisL