Font Family Naming in FontLab Studio 5

eliason
26 Mar 2012 — 2:26pm

http://www.kltf.de/downloads/FontNaming-kltf.pdf

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Cristobal Henestrosa
26 Mar 2012 — 2:51pm

>I tried to understand it but could not figure out it as the images included in the discussion were deleted.

I can see the images posted by Adam. FWIW, I am including them here.

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Theunis de Jong
26 Mar 2012 — 3:17pm

The problem with font naming is this:

1. You want three weights -- Light, Regular, Bold.
2. You want these under the same family name in applications that supports this (e.g., such as InDesign does).
3. You also want the Bold attribute to make either "Light' into "Regular", or "Regular" into "Bold". Note: you can only choose one of these.

Cristobal's bottom image shows the 'defaults' for naming your font for software that only support 'regular' and 'bold' styles (and 'italic' and 'bold italic' as well). At the top you enter the name that should appear as general "Font name"; at the bottom, the style name. With the checkboxes at the right you can indicate the sub-type, so you can name your font 'Semibold' but have it act as if it were "Bold" for your regular style.

With this naming scheme you can only make a 'family' of two weights, Regular and Bold. It doesn't matter if the style name is "Light" for one and "Regular" for the other, or "Condensed Bold" for one and "Condensed Black" for the other -- all you do here is indicate which one is 'regular' and which one is the corresponding 'bold'.

But if you can only define two weights, where do you tell you also have a third one? Suppose you are using this screen to define your "Regular" and "Bold". You cannot use the same family name for "Light" because you cannot indicate 'this is neither the Regular nor the Bold version'. You have to change the family name for your Light to something else -- you cannot re-use just "YourFont", with a style "Light". You must use something like "YourFont Light", and then set the style to "Regular".

Fortunately, you can fill in the correct family and style names in the other screen Cristobal shows, the one at the top. Here you should enter "YourFont" as a family name for all three styles, and "Light", "Regular", and "Bold" for each of your styles.

In software such as Word you will find "YourFont Light", without a Bold, and "YourFont", with both "Regular" and "Bold". In other, less brain-damaged software, you will see one "YourFont", with all three style options. In both cases, only when in Regular, pressing the hot key for 'bold' will give you your "Bold" font.

(Disclaimer: typed all of the above off the top of my head!)