Need to Generate Mac PostScript Type 1 with FontLab

Robby Woodard12 November 2009 · 08:48

I know it is being depreciated but I need to generate a large font family in Mac PostScript Type 1 format.

And none of the current family members are named Plain, Italic, Bold or Bold Italic.

I remember seeing this discussed here before and the process just seemed ridiculously complicated.

Does anybody have a link to those earlier discussions?

________________

Also... the whole process of generating type one and suitcases used to be so simple using Fontographer years ago.

Is that still the case with the new updated Fontographer?

Or have things just become that much more complicated across the board now?

Mark Simonson12 November 2009 · 09:18

Have you read the section "Building Font Suitcases" in the FontLab manual (page 312)? Seems like all the necessary info is there.

I think the only thing you can't do with FontLab is put more than the basic four-font family into one suitcase. But I'm pretty sure that Family builder couldn't do that either. To do that in the olden days I used the Finder, which let you open suitcases as if they were folders and move fonts in and out of them. Not possible anymore with the OS X Finder, unfortunately.

Stephen Rapp12 November 2009 · 09:30

http://forum.fontlab.com/fontlab-studio-tips-and-tricks/font-family-nami...

Robby Woodard12 November 2009 · 13:12

Mark~

That suitcase section of the manual makes my head spin.

And it doesn't come out and say that any suitcase can now only contain 4 fonts.

So, if my family has 12 members... I will need three separate suitcases. With all the naming conventions and Fond IDs and ATR compatible stuff set up properly.

I'm sorry for whining... but dang this all seems SO complicated!!!

But I will buckle down and read through everything three or four more times and try and make sense of it...

Thanks for your help!

Mark Simonson12 November 2009 · 13:35

Technically, you could make a Mac font family with up to 48 styles with Family Builder, but that was only because Outline, Shadow, Condensed, and Extended were available besides Italic and Bold. Practically no fonts were shipped with anything but families comprised of the basic four-font scheme (R/I/B/BI). So you still had to break multi-weight families into subfamilies back then.

Building Mac Type 1 fonts isn't really any different now, it's just that FontLab is designed for so many more possibilities.

James Montalbano12 November 2009 · 14:44

ATR, hasn't someone shot that dog by now?

Bert Vanderveen14 November 2009 · 06:15

Robby, OS X does not like coping with a multitude of screenfonts in a single suitcase. FYI.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

André G. Isaak14 November 2009 · 07:14

@Bert:

What problems does having a large family in a single suitcase pose? I have a number of older families which are packed into single suitcases, and breaking them up into smaller suitcases is a royal pain now that Classic is dead.

I haven't encountered any problems with them yet, but would like to know what potential problems it might pose to leave them that way.

André

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