Typblography

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.”

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.

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What fonts are bundled with Creative Suite 3? There will be a nicely formatted official page up in a week or two, but in the meantime, here’s the raw scoop. A few added notes are in order, though.

Hypatia Sans isn’t on the list as it’s a registration incentive rather than (strictly speaking) bundled.

This list only has the Suite configurations. But here’s what you need to know about some of the individual products in conjunction with that linked page:

- InDesign CS3 and Illustrator CS3 have the same bundle as Creative Suite 3 Design Standard
- Fireworks CS3 and Flash CS3 Professional bundle the Web Authoring Fonts.
- I *think* Photoshop CS3 has the “Standard Installed fonts” but not the “Standard Disk fonts”

I hope this is helpful. I’ll link to the official page when it’s up.

For months, buzz has been circulating about Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Originals typeface Arno Pro, thanks to the Photoshop CS3 public beta, which included a pre-release version. Various intrepid folks made samples of (the pre-release) Arno for all to see in this Typophile thread. Starting today you can get the final version of Arno Pro by purchasing any configuration of Creative Suite 3 or its major consituent graphics applications such as InDesign CS3, Illustrator CS3 or Photoshop CS3. Now, the main place to go is this main page for Arno, with all sorts of samples including some links to high-res PDFs.

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Well, it’s finally here. Hypatia Sans Pro, the new typeface I’ve been working on since 2002, is now available (though not yet at retail). It’s a geometric sans serif with humanist tendencies, and capitals based on classical roman proportions. When you register Creative Suite 3 or any of the individual CS3 products, you can get a “registration incentive” at no extra cost, and Hypatia Sans is one of the options. I wrote up a bunch of info and made a lot of graphics for the main Hypatia Sans page, including linked high-res PDFs. Robert Slimbach was kind enough to put together a nice text samples PDF, which I got too late to put on the main Web page – so for now you can only get it here.

Do follow the links above for general info on the design – I’m not going to repeat it all here. But I will add some more background and details that might be of interest.

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The CS3 icons (discussed in John Nack’s blog) are all done with two-letter abbreviations. The lettering uses a prototype of a future Robert Slimbach typeface currently called “Gauge.”

Here’s an even larger look at some of the icons.

For all you Bickham Script fans out there (and how can you not like a script typeface that has 20-30 alternates for each lowercase letter, and uses them automatically?), the good folks at Straight Loop have created this wondrous T-shirt designed by Chris King.

Too bad it’s only available in medium and large. Oh well!

The Type Directors Club in New York City recently announced its 14 winning entries from the TDC2 2006 type design competition. It’s always interesting to see the peak of quality and innovation in new typefaces.

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A couple of posts back, I was writing very much from the type designer’s perspective, sharing in their angst over the vast new opportunities (=work) that await them these days with multilingual OpenType fonts with lots of typographic features. But, as my colleague David Lemon pointed out after reading that article, the flip side of this coin is the customers’ point of view and their high expectations.

Our end users are easily confused and occasionally disappointed by OpenType. After all, everybody talks about the wonderful capabilities of the format. But the reality is, none of the fonts that are available has all those capabilities in just a single package, and no application supports all possible OpenType features. In fact, even of Adobe’s own fonts, fewer than half have significant OpenType features. Just because a font is in OpenType format doesn’t mean it has small caps, oldstyle figures or lots of ligatures. And it doesn’t say anything about having any added language support, either. And worse, it’s not like there are just two classes of fonts, “big” and “small,” but there are many possible levels of support, both typographic and linguistic….

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