Typophile

Font Book Preview Issue - Contextual Alternates

LauraWorthington

So today I received an email from MyFonts about a problem with my recent font release - Origins. Apparently a customer reported a problem - all of the lowercase letters in this font were showing up as alternates in the Font Book preview and the customer thought there was a general problem with the font because of this preview issue. (There isn't, just for the record, I and several others have tested it in different applications, but I can certainly see how someone else off hand might get this impression after installing it in Font Book and seeing that sort of preview.)

Confused and somewhat horrified, I launched Font Book and installed Origins (I usually use Suitcase Fusion for my font management, not Font Book) and lo and behold... all of the contextual alternates I had programmed into it were showing up instead of the standard lowercase letters. I asked a fellow designer and he said, "oh yeah, Font Book does that will all fonts that have contextual alternates" and sure enough, when I looked through my list of fonts - other designer's fonts, not my own - every font that has a set of contextual alternates previews that way in Font Book.

I did go back and took out everything in contextual alternates and made it into a stylistic set instead, however I'd really like to be able to use this opentype feature - but not if there are going to be complaints and/or misunderstandings because of a Font Book issue.

So what the heck do I do about this?! I performed some research online about this issue, and even went to the Mac store to ask about this, and didn't find anything. Is there a way to fix this when I generate the fonts from FontLab so it shows up correctly in Font Book's preview?

Any advice/wisdom/HELP that any of you awesome Typophiles could provide me with would be very much appreciated. Thanks!!!

Adam Shubinsky

I cannot offer you specific advise regarding potential font problems per se, nevertheless, back in the day, when I was still using apple's Font Book, I remember that it's previews got really strange at times, and that was due to that fact that the primary system language was not standard English (setting it to Czech made Font Book previews display some Polish caracters… go figure…).

So perhaps you investigation should begin with the "International" ("Language & Text" on Snow Leopard) settings on the Mac, and verify the system's primary language is English. Also, if you are not using Apple's latest OS (which is 10.6.3 at this time), try and see if you can replicate the problem on a machine that has this latest version installed. I know that Apple had tweaked and improved the Font Book application for their latest OS release (they had also made changes to the way the system handles fonts), even though it remains a rudimentary application at best.

I hope this information might help.

LauraWorthington

Thanks Adam! Unfortunately that didn't work, Font Book is still previewing with contextual alternates. I do have the latest OS installed... I have a feeling that this sort of thing is a fluke and not something that I personally can prevent from happening on others systems. Just troublesome getting your first customer complaint. :(

Ok, I'll stop whining now, thanks!!!

~ Laura

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