Typophile

pitfalls of using style names other than italic and roman

Dixon Yamada

Schwartz's Luxury does this, as Im sure others do. Instead of being able to pick between regular(roman) and italic, in illustrator you get a drop down menu with the options 'diamond' 'gold' and 'platnum.'

I have read the FL manual and figured out how to actually do this, but I know that doing anything unconventional in the computer world often ends up creating usability problems in some way. For example, perhaps doing this would make the fonts invisible to certain programs, because they don't understand the format.

If anybody has fooled around with this, I would love some pointers on how to make sure the fonts always work properly.

Karl Stange

If you use a guide such as Adam Twardoch's overview of font naming in FontLab and carefully map each field to test your results you should be able to get something working consistently.

However, even optimised fonts with sensible naming schemes can fall foul of the peculiarities of a given platform or application; the revised handling of font name metadata in Office 2010 (Windows) and Office 2011 (Mac) being a particularly tricky example and the primary reason for Adam's latest revision of the naming guide.

You would probably find using TTX to check naming fields and update that information a useful way of quickly updating the fonts as you test them. For more complex family groups I use Excel to keep track of the different fields.

Karl Stange

I have had a chance to experiment with this now and as you will see from the screen grab, it can work as long as you manipulate the right metadata fields. By way of example, below is the metadata for the Gomez Lurch weight/style:

Addams Family (Gomez Lurch)

Names and Copyright
Family Name: Addams Family
Weight: Gomez
Width: Normal
Number: 600
[Font is italic ticked]
Style Name: Italic
PS Font Name: AddamsFamily-GomezLurch
Full Name: AddamsFamily-GomezLurch
Menu Name: Addams Family
FOND Name: AddamsFamily GomezLurch

OpenType-specific names
OT Family Name: Addams Family
OT Style Name: Gomez Lurch
Mac Name: AddamsFamily-GomezLurch

This was done with FontLab (no TTX work needed) and the the shot is from InDesign CS6. It also worked in Word 2011 but not as well.

Captured from web.archive.org on 24 Aug 2013. view this capture