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The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
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Vladimir Tamari on "Why type matters #1"
A sad story, but the moral drawn from it is important. In the Arabic monoline* sans-serif font I am finalizing the dots are larger than usual - so much so that I was criticised for it. But if one considers ...
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James Lucas Hepokoski on "Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 & OpenType CFF Fonts"
I'm using Acrobat 8, as included with CS3 (plus any automatic updates), sorry to say. [Interesting. Our internal testers have been unable to replicate this problem, as you describe it. I'm not trying to deny that you're having this difficulty, ...
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Anne-Marie on "Type, Motion & Webby Awards"
"chuffed"? I had to look it up ... ;-) Anyway, congratulations, to you and Energi! AM
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Ep on "InDesign CS3 new font/text features"
I realize that your ability to comment on future business plans is limited. If you can tell us: Does Adobe plan to leave Middle Eastern language support to the WinSoft versions forever? Are there no plans to include Arabic support ...
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Anne-Marie on "OpenType icons for font vendors"
I still wish that there was an icon indicating if a font supported arbitrary fractions or not. The "7/8" icon covers too much ground. We've talked about this before and you gave me a good reason, but I forget. ;-) ...
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Göran Söderström on "OpenType icons for font vendors"
Great! Many thanks for making things easier! The OpenType format is still confusing for many regular users, so this will certainly help out.
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May 08, 2008
InDesign Font Conflicts
Periodically somebody asks how InDesign prioritizes fonts whose names conflict, or what consistutes a conflict, and nobody knows. Recently David Blatner (InDesignSecrets.com, co-author of Real World InDesign, Real World QuarkXPress, etc.) asked the same question, and sparked me to pull together the answers.
There are three kinds of name conflicts in InDesign that cause fonts to potentially not show up in the font menu.
1) Duplicate PostScript FontName
2) Duplicate menu name (as shown in InDesign)
3) Multiple "regular"-like styles in a single family
The third case is a bit different, so we'll take it separately.
April 24, 2008
But is it Garawood, or Zebramond?
"Garamond and Zebrawood walk into a bar, they have a few drinks and one thing leads to another… (yes they were hanging out at the same bar, believe it or not)."
"Create from scratch, the typographic love child of:
Garamond and Zebrawood"
See what Christian Robertson and other type designers came up with, on Typophile.
April 22, 2008
Why type matters #1
Failure to support the dotless i character in Turkish cell phone causes two deaths. Note to unnamed cell phone company: fix your bug.
No, it's not April 1st any more, and I couldn't make up a story this good. I got tipped to it from this article in Gizmodo.
Basically, in Turkish the dotless i is a different character than the i with a dot. Incorrectly leaving the dot on in displaying an SMS message from another cell phone led to a misunderstanding which culminated in a self-defence killing and a suicide.
Reportedly, most cell phones in Turkey don't support the dotless i (which in the article is called a "closed i" - I'm using the font geek term instead).
Now, one might wonder why the cell phones lack Turkish localization support. Is it because of the expense of localizing (tailoring to a specific market) or globalizing (supporting more or all markets)? Are many Turkish cell phones grey market imports because they can be had cheaper that way?
Even if all cell phone companies were to localize their Turkish offerings, the same story could have happened with Turkish immigrants living in another country. In a perfect world, we would have cell phones everywhere that supported all the world's languages. Of course, that's not about to happen any time soon.
But at least it helps raise awareness of the issue, and perhaps more folks will think about how much language support they can squeeze into a product, and the costs and benefits of doing so.
April 11, 2008
Type, Motion & Webby Awards
I and various of my Adobe colleagues were quite chuffed to learn that our interactive presentation "Type & Motion" has been nominated for a Webby award in the "Typography category! Congrats also to Energi Design who created this piece for us.
We'll have to wait until May 8th to find out if it wins. In the meantime, note that you can vote yourself for the "People's Voice" awards in each category. For example, to vote on "Best Use of Typography," go to the main People's Voice page, then navigate to Web Sites > Features > Best Use of Typography.
April 01, 2008
Typographic World News
It's been a remarkably busy typographic news week. First, we hear that the letters of the famous Hollywood sign are decaying due to global warming.
Then, we learn that Erik Spiekermann has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
In related news, today is also the 8th anniversary of The Guardian's "Return to San Seriffe" article. For more about this amazing island nation, see Wikipedia.
On a day like this, I start to think anything is possible!
March 25, 2008
OpenType icons for font vendors
One of the things I really enjoy about my job is when we get to do things, large or small, that help other font vendors as well as customers.
We have a bunch of icons which are used on the Adobe web site to identify different character set coverage and the presence of various OpenType typographic goodies in our fonts. A year or two ago I mentioned that we would be happy to share them with other font vendors, and a few people wrote me to take me up on my offer. But we've updated the icons since then. Now I'm able to offer for download not only the GIF files, but also the outline fonts we used to create them, and a useful readme about the icons.
March 24, 2008
ATypI 2008 Russia St Petersburg - call for papers
The 2008 conference of the International Typographic Association (ATypI) will take place in St Petersburg, Russia, September 17-21. The deadline for talk proposals for both the main track and the TypeTech Forum is Thursday, March 27th. Details here.
[UPDATE March 27th: Deadline extended to Monday, April 14th.]
For the TypeTech Forum section of the conference, I also welcome any proposals for longer workshops, say half-day or full-day, if the topic will be of interest to a sufficient proportion of font developers.
March 14, 2008
Font Business Summit in April
There's a day-and-a-half "Font Business Summit" on April 3-4, hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and organized by the Font Designers Rights Coalition (FDRC).
March 11, 2008
Font Folio Education Essentials & AIGA
Adobe today launched a new font package, which I'm very pleased with: Font Folio Education Essentials. We worked with the good people at AIGA (American Institute for the Graphic Arts) to come up with the best bundle we could for educators and students. Estimated street price for this package of 500 fonts is USD $149 for a single user (with volume discounts available for schools). Read about it here.
March 07, 2008
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 & OpenType CFF Fonts
Microsoft has been hard at work fixing a couple of bugs Windows PowerPoint 2007 has in working with OpenType CFF ("PostScript" flavored OpenType) fonts.
The first is pretty serious. Set text above 64 point in an OpenType CFF font, and it all munges together, overlapping. It's basically unreadable and unusable at these sizes.
February 23, 2008
Creative Suite Font Installation & Conflicts - Survey
I would like to get your feedback (by March 3rd) on different options for font installation by Adobe applications, such as the Creative Suite and many of its components.
February 08, 2008
New kind of font match(mak)ing
Just too weird and fun not to share, Extensis' new time-wasting web site that's part "what font are you" quiz and part showing what would happen if fonts were people and tried to date.
Amanda Paull from Extensis tried to post this as a comment, but it's too cool to hide away like that. :)
"Thought your readers might have some fun with this on Valentine’s day: its a font matching/ dating game thingy. Hard to explain, but a fun diversion for font fanatics..."
January 29, 2008
OpenType 1.5 draft & 1.6 suggestions
Adobe and Microsoft just posted a notice on the OpenType mailing list about a draft of version 1.5 of the OpenType spec, and requesting suggestions/proposals for version 1.6.
If you're interested in the mailing list:
subscribe: opentype-migration-sub@indx.co.uk
unsubscribe: opentype-migration-unsub@indx.co.uk
messages: opentype-migration-list@indx.co.uk
Here's the text of our posts, with handy links.
December 09, 2007
Combining accents in future fonts
The main reason for having combining accents in a font is if you also have mark attachment information in the same font, so as to actually support positioning the diacritic relative to a base letter.
Currently none of Adobe's western fonts support this functionality. There are several reasons for this:
1) Prior to InDesign CS3, none of Adobe's flagship creative graphics/publishing applications supported mark attachment in the regular western version.
2) Adobe's FDK (and thus FontLab) don't yet support mark attachment, so it was not easy for us to do in OpenType CFF fonts.
3) it's more challenging to do the contextual kerning required to kern these dynamically combined accented letters.
So, with InDesign CS3 out, we now have an Adobe app that can use this functionality.
Moving forwards, for most of the language support we have done before, we will continue to use prcomposed accents. But for more extended language support, which we are starting to work on now, we will use OpenType mark attachment ('mark', 'mkmk' and 'mlig' features as appropriate).
As you might guess from that, we'll be enabling this by adding support for mark attachment to our own Adobe FDK for OpenType, which also yields source code for FontLab and DTL FontMaster. I can't give you a clear timeline, but I'll say that the fact we want to use the functionality ourselves increases the priority of getting it into our tools.
November 14, 2007
Web fonts: user survey results
Here are some initial results for my survey of Web designers/developers and their opinions on issues that relate to prospective technologies for Web fonts, as discussed in my last post.
November 05, 2007
Web font embedding returns: Survey!
Last year I posted about free fonts on the web, and briefly mentioned (in the penultimate paragraph) a new CSS-based approach to allow referencing of specific fonts on web servers from HTML web pages. This approach, promoted by CSS co-inventor and Opera CTO Häkon Lie, seems to be gaining momentum, with suport now coming in Safari via WebKit. My personal take on this is two-fold: for the actual end-users, folks designing/producing web pages, it is far too limited because 95%+ of all fonts can't legally be used in this way; for font vendors it's scary because it gives users a reason to make retail fonts publicly accessible on Web servers. In reponse to this, Microsoft has now offered to donate their old EOT web font embedding format to the W3C.
One thing that's been odd is that nobody has really asked typical Web designers/developers what they think of the different solutions for fonts on the Web, and how they'd do things in this brave new world. To try to correct that problem, I have created the following anonymous survey: Click Here to take the survey.
If you're a font vendor, I have a different survey here just for you.