[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next]
[Date Index] [Thread Index] [New search]

Re: Font warlocks: anomalous behaviour of font options in Para Designer

Hedley,

I think that the anomalies that you are encountering stem
from the fact that there are fundamental differences between
how the MacOS and Windows deal with fonts and styles.

Apple Garamond was a very early TrueType font designed
exclusively for use on the Macintosh. The internal weight
fields within the font were not designed to deal with the
quirkiness with which Windows and especially Windows 
applications want to have neat packages of "regular," "bold,"
"italic," and "bold italic." Font families with additional 
weights such as "light," "ultra-light," "book," medium,"
"black," "ultra," plus other weights cause havoc under 
Windows. All sorts of machinations much be resorted to in 
order to deal with this with some oddball results.

For example, the Adobe version of the ITC Souvenir font
family has light, medium, demibold, and bold members.
Under Windows, if you apply bold to text in light, the
result is text in demibold and if you apply bold to text
in medium, the result is text in bold. This is, believe
or not, by design and for Adobe to "get it correct" required
knowledge of exactly how the internal font mechanisms work
within Windows. And internal values within the fonts are
further tweaked to make sure that the same associations
work when the Mac versions of these fonts are used with
applications under MacOS.

Is this good? No it isn't. It is exactly why Adobe has
moved to use its own font subsystem in its applications
such as Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign
so that users can choose fonts by exact weights and
styles they want as opposed to having to guess and then
pray. Considering everything, both FrameMaker and PageMaker,
older Adobe applications, do a damned good job dealing with
these issues on a cross-platform basis, it does require
fonts that have been properly "packaged."

Back to Apple Garamond. Others will hopefully weigh in on
this, but I believe that Apple Garamond was sourced from
Bitstream and was never intended for use other than on
Macintosh and by authorized employees and agents of Apple
Computer. It is possible that the Windows versions of these
fonts that you have are unauthorized "conversions" to the
Windows TrueType format from the Mac TrueType format.
In fact, there is not much of a difference between these
formats and programs can "convert" from one to the other
on a Macintosh without lossiness. The Mac TrueType differs
from the Windows version by storing the font in the font
file's "resource fork" as opposed to the file's "data fork".
Plus, there appears to be a header prefixed to what is otherwise
the common TrueType font format that would used under Windows.
But since this font and its styles were not setup and reconciled
to be used under Windows, don't expect it work "correctly."

        - Dov

At 2/10/2002 05:15 PM, hedley_finger@myob.com.au wrote:

>All:
>
>I downloaded a set of the Apple Garamond typeface family from one of those
>Mac grab-bag sites:
>
>AppleGaramond-Light.ttf         // Apple Garamond Light
>AppleGaramond-LightItalic.ttf
>AppleGaramond.ttf               // Apple Garamond Book
>AppleGaramond-Italic.ttf
>AppleGaramond-Bold.ttf          // Apple Garamond Bold
>AppleGaramond-BoldItalic.ttf
>
>These TrueType fonts installed okay in the c:\WINNT\Fonts\ folder and when
>double-clicked display the specimen sheet, which can be printed okay.  But
>they don't show up in the Word font list.
>
>They do show up in the FrameMaker font list but applying them produces
>anomalous behaviour.  For example, you would expect that to produce the
>following screen and print appearance, the fields in the Para Designer
>would be as follows (or something similar):
>
>SCREEN+  PRINT+  FAMILY*              ANGLE*   WEIGHT* VAR.*
>
>Lt,Reg   Lt,Reg  Apple Garamond       Regular  Light   Regular
>Lt,It    Lt,It   Apple Garamond       Italic   Light   Regular
>Bk,Reg   Bk,Reg  Apple Garamond       Regular  Regular Regular
>Bk,It    Bk,It   Apple Garamond       Italic   Regular Regular
>Bld,Reg  Bld,Reg Apple Garamond       Regular  Bold    Regular
>Bld,It   Bld,It  Apple Garamond       Italic   Bold    Regular
>
>  + Appearance on monitor and in printed output.
>  * Paragraph Designer dialogue field values.
>
>However, I actually get THESE choices in the different fields:
>
>FAMILY*              ANGLE*   WEIGHT* VAR.*
>
>Apple Garamond       Regular  Regular Regular
>Apple Garamond Light Italic   Bold
>                     Obliqued Bolded
>
>(Note the Italic-Obliqued and Bold-Bolded synonyms.)  This means I get TWO
>ways of displaying Apple Garamond Book on screen, but only ONE of them also
>PRINTS as Apple Garamond Book!
>
>    SCREEN+  PRINT+  FAMILY*              ANGLE*   WEIGHT* VAR.*
>
>1   Lt,Reg   Lt,Reg  APPLE GARAMOND LIGHT Reg.     Reg.    Reg.
>2   Lt,It    Lt,It   APPLE GARAMOND LIGHT Italic   Reg.    Reg.
>3   BK,REG   LT,REG  APPLE GARAMOND LIGHT Reg.     BOLDED  Reg.
>4   BK,IT    LT,IT   APPLE GARAMOND LIGHT OBLIQUED BOLDED  Reg.
>5   BK,REG   BK,REG  APPLE GARAMOND       Reg.     REG.    Reg.
>6   BK,IT    BK,IT   APPLE GARAMOND       Italic   REG.    Reg.
>7   Bld,Reg  Bld,Reg APPLE GARAMOND       Reg.     Bold    Reg.
>8   Bld,It   Bld,It  APPLE GARAMOND       Italic   Bold    Reg.
>
>The values in lines 3 and 4 give me Apple Garamond Book onscreen but print
>as Light.  Lines 5 and 6 give me Book onscreen and also print as Book.
>
>Does anybody know why this madness is occurring?  Can it be fixed?  That
>is, are there any font-twiddling tools out there that can fix this kind of
>problem for FrameMaker?
>
>[Windows 2000, FrameMaker 6.0p405, FrameScript 1.27C01, Enhance 2.03,
>Acrobat 4.05.2, mif2go 31u33, WebWorks Publisher 7.0, IXgen 5.5.h, HTML
>Help Workshop 4.74 build 8702.0, HTML Help 1.31]
>
>Regards,
>Hedley
>
>P.S.  A special thank you to TextPad for its wonderful block select,
>delete, and insert mode, and for regular expressions!
>
>--
>Subscribe to Free Framers -- send this message
>      subscribe framers your@email.address
>      help
>      end
>to <mailto:majordomo@omsys.com?Subject=Subscribe%20Free%20Framers>
>
>Hedley Finger
>Adobe Certified Expert, FrameMaker 5.5.x
>Technical Communications/Best Practice Mentor
>MYOB Australia Pty Ltd  <http://www.myob.com.au>
>P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
>12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood 3151   Australia
>Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421  Fax. +61 3 9222 9880  Mob. +61 412 461 558
><mailto:hedley_finger@myob.com.au>
>
>
>** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
>** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **


** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **