September 2008 Archives

For folks doing an upgrade, the CS4 font list looks a lot like CS3, except for a few fonts removed, and a new registration incentive: the complete Sanvito Pro family (there will be a new landing page for this family, but it's not up yet). Sanvito Pro is a versatile informal script face with four weights and four optical size variants for each weight, for a total of 16 fonts.

Typefaces you might have seen in CS3 that aren't in CS4: Arno Pro, Bickham Script Pro, Garamond Premier Pro. Further typefaces bundled with InDesign CS3 but not InDesign CS4: Bernhard Modern Std, Caflisch Script Pro.

There are more East Asian fonts, notably:
- Adobe Kaiti Std and Adobe Fangsong Std, additional simplified Chinese fonts
- With InDesign and suites including InDesign, the "Pr6N" versions of the Kozuka Gothic and Kozuka Mincho typefaces. These fonts have the Adobe-Japan1-6 character set, and are JIS-2004 savvy.

All in all, still a LOT of fonts, just a slightly smaller set.

I am in the midst of a lot of public speaking right now. The last few days it's been at the ATypI conference in St Petersburg, Russia (where, to my considerable surprise, I was one of a number of recipients of a medal from the Russian government last night - it's a strange world, friends).

Monday night (tomorrow) at the InDesign User Group in London, England, I'll be doing an updated version of my favorite talk: Typography for Humans. "Traditonal typography was restricted by mechanical limitations. However, the digital technology of OpenType has spawned fonts which celebrate the human hand and the human mind, from random elements that mimic handwriting and calligraphy, to fonts that translate themselves, censor themselves, or predict the future. Along the way, fine typography is largely automated. But it is still easy to create typography which, in favoring aesthetics or tradition over legibility, fails to achieve its basic purpose of communication. Thomas Phinney explores and demonstrates these human and anti-human developments on the frontiers of digital typography, with typefaces created by himself, his Adobe colleagues, and others around the world."

Admission is free, and if it's like other IDUG meetings I've been to, so is the pizza. :)

October 18th, at the AIGA "Social Studies" conference (graphic design education conference) in Baltimore, I'll be doing a short talk on legibility in typography.

October 23rd, I'll be giving the same talk as the London one above, at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.

October 27th I'll be speaking at the University of Lethbridge (Canada).

As part of this late October road trip, I may also line up something in Calgary and possibly Vancouver as well... TBD. Let me know if you have any suggestions of people I should work with to arrange such a talk. :)

Arial Narrow is fixed! No longer will it be reproducing like crazy... no, wait, not that kind of fix.

Users of many Adobe applications such as InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop have been noticing for a while that the version of the four Arial Narrow fonts that ship with Office 2007 and Windows Vista had a problem. They didn't show up correctly in the font menus of these Adobe applications. Instead of four styles of Arial Narrow showing up, there would be just one. It was however under the main "Arial" family, unlike the older version of Arial Narrow.

Basically, Microsoft tried to enhance the font menu names for the family, but inadvertently gave all four fonts the same style of just "Narrow" rather than the needed "Narrow Italic" and so on. We worked with them to identify the problem and how to fix it, and they've now released the fixed fonts. These will doubtless show up in some future service pack(s) for Office and/or Windows, but until then, follow that link for a "Hotfix."

ADDENDUM: [added 12 Sep 2008] The process of installing the new fonts may confuse the Adobe font caches. As my colleague Dov Isaacs put it, "The trick is that you need to rebuild the Adobe font cache mechanism. First, exit all Adobe programs. Then, search and delete ALL files of the form AdobeFnt##.lst where ## is a two digit number."

We're looking for some feedback from the font developer community on how you want the AFDKO/FontLab/FontMaster code syntax to work for mark attachment. Please comment! Comments received by Friday September 29th will be most likely to influence our implementation.

In OpenType fonts, mark attachment is the GPOS (glyph positioning) rule which dynamically positions diacritical marks (accents and the like) relative to base characters or other marks.

The currently available version of Adobe's Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO) does not support OpenType mark attachment. Hence, other tools based on the AFDKO, such as FontLab or DTL FontMaster, do not support it either. We're currently implementing such support, which will in turn determine the underlying code used by such third party tools. This also means extending the syntax of the AFDKO language to represent mark attachment. However, mark attachment is complicated, and gets even more so when one makes it contextual. The best way to represent it in the same style as other AFDKO code is not entirely clear. Here's what we'd like your feedback on.

(Special thanks to Read Roberts, AFDKO engineer, for the remainder of this post!)

Adobe is strongly supportive of the effort to make Microsoft’s EOT web font format an open standard. Indeed, Adobe pays for Steve Zilles’ time, and he will be chairing the EOT standardization effort, should the W3C accept the proposal in principle. We will be updating our licensing FAQ to make it clear that our existing font license terms allow EOT usage, and do not allow linking to original fonts placed on web servers.

Why do we support EOT? Our surveys of web designers and font developers have made it clear to us that users want an HTML/CSS font solution that allows them to use any font they want, and most of them would like to do so legally. In particular, they want to be able to use regular retail and OS-bundled fonts. With original fonts on web servers, hardly any retail or commonly-used fonts could legally be used; only freeware and open source fonts, some shareware, and a handful of retail fonts.

Some open source advocates argue that there are enough and good enough free/libre and open source fonts available that retail/commercial fonts are unnecessary. Whether they are right in principle or not (and I think not, given how few such fonts are decently made and come in even a basic set of four styles with bold, italic and bold italic), it doesn't matter: the web designers who make web sites want to be able to use a vastly wider variety of fonts, and companies and organizations that have a web presence want to use their existing visual identity online, or at least a close adaptation. Being able to use 50% of the world's fonts instead of 5% comes a lot closer to meeting these needs.

Why is it so? EOT comes vastly closer because many more type foundries and type designers are comfortable with EOT than are comfortable with original fonts on Web servers. And that includes Adobe.