Re: font advice sought

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Graeme,

FWIW, Kepler was used very successfully for several years as the
typeface for Adobe Magazine until it folded. Readability was quite
high.

With regards to Multiple Master Fonts ...

Adobe will continue to support use of those fonts into the indefinite
future since the "faux fonts" capability of Acrobat and PDF is built
upon that technology. Since we plan to always support PDF 1.0, we
must continue to support those fonts. However, OS and application
support is becoming spottier. MacOS X does not seem to adequately
support Multiple Master fonts. Windows 2000/XP doesn't natively
support them, etc.

If in fact you do use them in PDF files, make sure you embed the
fonts and don't, repeat don't try any funny PDF refrying tricks.
Under refrying, Multiple Masters are very problematic.

When looking at your choices technically, Utopia was a Type 1 font
with 4 weights (regular, semibold, and bold with italic; black without
a matching italic) and with matching expert set typefaces available. It
is now available as a 25 face OpenType family with optical variations.
The expert set characters have been folded into the base fonts.

Kepler is still in the process of being tweaked in terms of its 
release as an OpenType family. I believe that there will be over 100
faces in the Kepler OpenType family, mirroring the weight, optical size,
and width axis of the Multiple Master predefined instances with matching
italics, of course. It may be a while before that is released.

Generally speaking, for Western Latin character set-based text work
with FrameMaker, I would recommend the OpenType fonts because they are
cross platform and easy to use. Within PDF files, they look and act
just like Type 1 fonts. The only exception to this is if you are 
actually using the expert characters, i.e., small caps, old style figures,
swash characters, etc. Although in the OpenType version of Utopia (for
example), these characters exist, they are not at all available via
FrameMaker.

Thus, if aesthetically you like Utopia, you should use the Utopia Std
OpenType family unless you need the special characters of the expert 
faces.

For Kepler, you currently do not have a choice. The OpenType versions
are not yet available (might be a little while longer). When they
are available, you will have the same issue as with Utopia vis-a-vis
the expert characters. In the meantime, if you do nothing foolish
(not embedding fonts in PDF, refrying, etc.), you should not have
any real problem with the Kepler Multiple Master fonts under MacOS 9.x
with ATM enabled.

Good luck.

        - Dov ("Fontsy" Dov)


At 1/31/2003 03:23 PM, Graeme Forbes wrote:
>Platform:
>
>FM7 running in MacOS9.1 and OSX/Classic
>
>
>I'm about to start writing a book that I'll be delivering as camera-ready copy or as pdf files. I'll be typing it directly into FM with pages set up for the printer.
>
>I've narrowed text font choices to two: Utopia/Utopia Expert and KeplerMM (both by Robert Slimbach for Adobe).
>
>Question 1, somewhat off-topic: anyone got any aesthetic preferences for one over the other?
>
>Question 2: Kepler is a Multiple Master font, Utopia a standard one. The MM flexibility could be quite useful, e.g. much of the technical notation will be in a semi-boldish weight, and the ability to set the weight *exactly* is nice. There are also italic faces in the Kepler family missing in the Utopia one.
>
>Does anyone think I'd be inviting trouble using an MM font? I've already noticed that in OS X there's quite a slowdown in scrolling speed with Kepler - the text is "painted" on the screen with perceptible hesitation at font changes (doesn't apply to native OS9). I can live with that, but what about, e.g., making the pdf files if that's the way I do it? Do user-created instances of an MM master embed without a fuss? Of course I'll test this early in the process, but even setting up the templates will take a bit of time, so if there are downsides to using MMs, I'd like to hear in advance.
>
>Graeme Forbes


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