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Renaming a released font
Posted by evertype in
28 May 2011 — 4:38am
28 May 2011 — 4:38am
Oops.In 1997 I released a revival of the Watts face used in a 19th-century bible, under the name "Acaill". I'm about to release a new version of this, but I'm thinking about changing the name.
Why? Because "Acaill" is a rather quirky Gaelic font and since its name is at the beginning of the alphabet, it loads before other more standard fonts, and I often get an Acaill glyph (say in a Wikipedia article) when I'd rather something more mainstream.
Is it kosher to re-name a released font, and to retire the old name?
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28 May 2011 — 7:11am
>it loads before other more standard fonts, and I often get an Acaill glyph (say in a Wikipedia article)
Which browsers and OS are you seeing this behavior? Sort order seems a strange way for font fallback to work.
28 May 2011 — 7:48am
Mac OS, various browsers. The characters in question are rare, and recently encoded, and are not part of any shipping core fonts. So the OS has to find a glyph to display them with, and it polls the installed fonts in alphabetical order until it finds one.
How else should the OS find a glyph that's not in the core or fallback fonts?
28 May 2011 — 8:58am
I renamed Walbaum News to Walburn (a made-up name), for several reasons.
Firstly, the name field was getting a bit crowded when "Display Bold italic" was added.
Secondly, I wasn't comfortable that it was a genuine Walbaum, considering the liberties I'd taken with it.
Thirdly, there were quite a few other Walbaums out there.
The original Beaufort was renamed Beaufort Old Style when I released the new, improved version.
Then I withdrew it.
28 May 2011 — 9:03am
>How else should the OS find a glyph that's not in the core or fallback fonts?
I suppose if it doesn't know about the code point then alphabetic order is understandable, but maybe should take panose values into account to say pick a font similar in design to the CSS "sans-serif" default (in the case of wikipedia).
Si
28 May 2011 — 11:40am
You could rename it EVRTP Acaill ;-)
Just joking, I don’t really like the various foundries’ suffixes. But I see plenty of renamed fonts, for one reason or another (sure yours is a peculiar one ;-)
One that comes to mind is Yanone Kaffeesats, renamed Kava when it went “pro“.
28 May 2011 — 12:54pm
I'll probably rename it Dumha Goirt, then.
28 May 2011 — 2:16pm
You should also make a font called Aaaarghversion that's a pirate version (hence the name) of the Mac OS default CSS sans font that includes the obscure codepoints.