Typophile - OT Font Naming - Comments

Since MS also makes the most

dezcom — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:59:43 -0700

Since MS also makes the most used office apps in the world, one might expect that they have a huge say in getting WPF applied in MS-Office?

ChrisL

Actually, Microsoft has

Thomas Phinney — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:28:11 -0700

Actually, Microsoft has changed their font menu name handling dramatically, in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), their new API. (They couldn’t change it in GDI without breaking existing apps.) WPF is available in Vista, and can optionally be installed on XP.

Now the problem is that no major office type apps have moved to WPF. Actually, hardly any major apps of any type.

My latest version of my font naming presentation includes WPF info, and I’ve spoken about it at ATypI TypeTech and TypoTechnica. MS has plenty of info on it as well.

Cheers,

Here is another recent

Vladimir Tamari — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:37:49 -0700

Here is another recent thread on a very similar question of font naming. The emphasis here was my wanting to get rid of ’fake bolds’ generated in MS Word.
http://typophile.com/node/44050

MS has made great strides

dezcom — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:20:59 -0700

MS has made great strides since Windows 3.1 in many areas. They have even made great strides in language support for OpenType but they have not done jack with that antiquated 4 number family limit on fonts.

ChrisL

Yeah, I don’t have much

Mike Jarboe — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:55:21 -0700

Yeah, I don’t have much respect for MS or the world of PC’s, it all just seems overly complicated and non user friendly on all levels.

Message to Microsoft: The 4

dezcom — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:06:13 -0700

Message to Microsoft: The 4 unit family of fonts has far outlived its usefullness and is now a real pain in the tuchus. Don’t you think it is time for a change? Just think of the 4 font limit as MSDOS, it had its time but then you moved on.

ChrisL

Yeah, but users in Windows

Thomas Phinney — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:14:16 -0700

Yeah, but users in Windows GDI apps will be getting faux bolds all the time.... It’s a tradeoff.

OK, but are not almost all

Goran Soderstrom — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 03:45:40 -0700

OK, but are not almost all FontFonts (even the older postscript versions) considered more as separate fonts than as families, strictly technical that is? I remember older postscript fonts also having this approach, sometimes ending up with rather long font menues with no sub-menues at all.

I kind of like this, as a matter of fact, because it force the user to actively chose the right weight manually, and by that there will be no confusion what so ever.

Don’t get carried away on

Jens Kutilek — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 03:33:53 -0700

Don’t get carried away on “the” FontShop naming convention. Naming conventions are always evolving, and Meta OT is quite old and an easy case namewise, because none of the strings needs to be shortened in order to meet some character count limits in the name records.

Is this on CS3 apps again?

Mike Jarboe — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:45:30 -0700

Is this on CS3 apps again? If so, the the Weight values in the fonts might not be quite right.

Yes, it is on CS3 apps, although I’m positive the weight values are correct, in a descending order from lightest to heaviest as I’m very careful with these details after having gone over and over them.

What is interesting, is, shortly after trying the Fontshop naming convention, I went back in for further testing and re-named all styles similar to (A Twardoch’s naming how-to and kl’s), yet I eliminated the ’Menu Name’, ’FOND Name’, and on the next page, ’Mac Name’ was left blank as well.

I then re-generated the ’Additional OpenType Name’ panel for each and the generated font family worked excellent, with the sub-menu styles in order from lightest to heaviest (and all styles showing up in the sub-menu correctly).

In a way, I’ve come full circle with this issue, coming to understand what fields are most important and what role they play. As of now, I plan to sticking to the convention I just mentioned as it seems to work best, and it splits the 6 styles into 2 sub families for MS.
The ExtraLight and Light styles have the ’Family Name’ of Myfont Lt and the other four weights the family name of Myfont Rg and every other field is consistent within this family.

I agree that if you saw

Mike Jarboe — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:34:04 -0700

I agree that if you saw someone doing it at least once, everything would be a lot simpler and easier to understand. Perhaps I should really consider making videocasts of the different steps: Installing the AFDKO, Making the First Font, Naming the Family, ...

Yes, that would be great, I briefly had that thought when I was looking at how complex AFDKO seems to be (coming from the more creative side of things as opposed to programming). Making it to TypeCon would be great but a videocast would be really helpful in the meantime. Thanks Miguel…

Have you tried following the

Mike Jarboe — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:31:29 -0700

Have you tried following the instructions at http://typophile.com/node/20078 ?

Yes, but I get kind of lost within the terminal application, it’s bizarre to be working with an application that is a text window running commands. If I saw a live example I think I would have a better understanding and the ability to get through it.

> this is some crazy

Miguel Sousa — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:40:16 -0700

> this is some crazy programming stuff that doesn’t make much sense at all

> I did notice that the

Miguel Sousa — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:30:22 -0700

> I did notice that the order of the sub-menu was slightly different than what I am used to.

Is this on CS3 apps again? If so, the the Weight values in the fonts might not be quite right.

> Can someone explain how to

Miguel Sousa — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:26:56 -0700

> Can someone explain how to ’Run the FinishInstallOSX command file on MacOSX’…

Have you tried following the instructions at http://typophile.com/node/20078 ?

OT Font Naming

Mike Jarboe — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:44:29 -0700

I’m currently having trouble with a OpenType family of six weights (ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold) where I’ve tried different naming options (AT’s MSN Forum naming guide) yet no matter what changes I make the sub-menu omits Light and Medium styles. (I’ve never had problems with up to three styles it’s the six that is troubling)

Everything looks good and consistent with the naming and all the styles show up under one family in Font Explorer… any ideas of what could be the problem?

Mike