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.

"Create from scratch, the typographic love child of:
Garamond and Zebrawood"

See what Christian Robertson and other type designers came up with, on Typophile.

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.

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.

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!

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.

[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.

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.

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..."

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Here's the text of our posts, with handy links.

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.