🚀 go-pugleaf

P.S. I have read the FAQ on MM fonts, but it is rather out-of-date. A brief note was added in 11/05, but the bulk of the material is from 2003.

I don't think the MM FAQ is terribly out of date because nothing has changes. I don't know of any other new way to create MM instances. (Remember also that Adobe stopped selling and supporting MM fonts years ago, now.)

Regards,

T

Someone posted a brief message about a year ago claiming that Illustrator 10 could create new instances of MM fonts stored in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts; but this is not the case for Illustrator 11 (CS), which allows horizontal and vertical scaling but offers no controls for customizing MM fonts.

Not much response on this topic! Am I the only one who loves MM fonts?

I decided to investigate the claim that Illustrator 10 (running under OS X) could create new MM instances and Bingo! This works with MM fonts that are installed in the following location:

Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/Reqrd/Base

Any MM font installed here appears in Illustrator's font list and can be adjusedt it by selecting Window/Type/MM Design. Unfortunately, Adobe has dropped this feature from Illustrator CS and beyond. New instances are saved, evidently, because they show up when Illustrator is relaunched, but they do not appear as new MM font files in their new location; and copying the (presumably) altered MM font files back to Library/Fonts does not make the new instances available in other applications as claimed by the author of this tip. This workaround therefore relies completely on Illustrator 10, which thankfully does run on my Intel-powered iMac and will hopefully continue to run under Leopard and beyond.

alansky,

In case you did not know it, Thomas is the authoritative figure at Adobe when it comes to font issues (click on his name).

Like you, I miss the technology. Unfortunately, multiple master fonts never enjoyed the popularity they truly deserved, and the discontinuation of ATM removes the ability to manipulate the fonts. That said, MM fonts should work just like other Type 1 fonts under Mac OS X.

BTW, the fact that you can get ATM Deluxe to work for you under Classic emulation is a bit of luck in itself. Unlike ATM Light, ATM Deluxe is not compatible with Classic. And the older version of Illustrator may not work forever either.

Not the best answer for you. But I hope it helps.

Neil

Thanks, Neil.

At least I still have a working collection of MM fonts! Sounds like the real hot tip would be to crank out a set of new instances for all of them before I get rid of my G4. That's not the same as adjusting them as needed on the fly, but does amount to creating a bunch of font super families, which is certainly more useful than being limited to the same old "regular and bold."

I can't help thinking that MM fonts would be a big hit today if weight and width sliders were integrated into the default Font panel. It may be that MM technology got left behind because the process could not be automatically applied to the entire Adobe Type Library. Making MM fonts was always an extremely slow and labor-intensive process.

Cheers,

Alan

Alan, 

      Sounds like the real hot tip would be to crank out a set of new instances
      for all of them before I get rid of my G4.




Go for it. Then get a nice, sleek, new Mac tower. You'll be amazed!

But another problem is that Adobe was looking for a modern, multi-language, gazillion-glyph, bi-platform font technology, which it developed with OpenType.

Not the same, of course...

Neil

No question that the problems addressed by multiple master fonts and those addressed by OpenType are distinct.

Alan's right that one big issue is that updating existing fonts to MM tech would be pretty difficult. On the other hand, massive expansion of typographic or linguistic capabilities isn't easy, either (although not too tough in those cases when one's just merging existing fonts).

With regards to Illustrator 10, I don't *think* it's actually making new instances in the sense of modifying the original font info on disk - but you could verify this by carefully looking at modification dates on your files. Instead, I think it is making sort of "virtual instances" that are part of the specific Illustrator file. I'll grant that I'm not sure on this count, and don't have a copy of Illustrator 10 to check.

Cheers,

T

For the benefit of others who may want to try this trick:

Illustrator 10's MM Design tool is very simplistic (no width slider). Thomas may be correct in guessing that the "instances" created by this method aren't real. I can't find any new font files after creating them, but a new instance created in one Illustrator 10 document does show up in the font menu when the same MM font is used in other Illustrator 10 documents. It isn't a perfect solution, but it's something.