🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <14827@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> isle@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ken Hancock) writes:
>Now that Adobe has finally switched over to shipping their
>fonts in NFNT format, I thought many problems would be solved.

Some are, but NFNTs are not a perfect solution. ID conflicts were reduced
and the fonts are in the new format. [NFNTs have a slight problem, the new
numbers are for the FONDs and Adobe has registered there fonts with Apple
and has unique IDs from Apple. But off of this base FOND you have your
style links to the NFNT fonts to display the font. The problem here is that
for one FOND (with a registered ID), it can have 20 faces or more - my example
is 10,12,14,18,24 point in plain, bold, italic, bold-italic, and these NFNT
numbers aren't registered and are randomly changed by the Font/DA mover when
you copy fonts to a new suitcase (see technote 198). So if you use MasterJuggler
or Suitcase to access your fonts, the base FONDs are okay, but the font files
may have conflicting NFNT numbers. This is where MasterJuggler 1.5's auto
NFNT renumber is a savior. You can also get a simliar effect by using Suitcase
II's Font Harmonizer and selecting all the font files and harmonizing them.]

>Then someone told me that the bitmap files that Adobe is
>shipping still contain a FOND resource for each styled
>font.  (See Technote #198.  This is labeled as the WRONG
>way to do it...  There should only be one FOND for the
>font family).
>Would someone who has the new Adobe files please verify
>if this is true and e-mail?  I'll summarize to the net.
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I guess I'm summarizing here :-)

In the ideal world there would be only one FOND - if the ideal world
all applications support using fonts by font name (TechNote 191) and 
all fonts were only 4 faces (plain, bold, italic, bolditalic).

Unfortunately, this isn't true. When the choice was made to go from FONTs to
NFNTs, a lot of decisions were made. Should we do it? How do we best support
the current user base? How do we not break applications that people have
(Word 1.x, PageMaker 2.x, etc...)? The hardest part was deciding whether to
go with 'short menus' - where you have the single FOND that knows about
the style links, but it was designed for a 4 face family, and most of the new
fonts on the market have more faces than that (semi-bold, semi-bold italic).
With this situation you have two short menus, one for [plain, bold, italic,
bolditalic] and another for [semi-bold,semi-bolditalic]. But wait, some 
designers would want their font weights combined differently - switch 
the semis and bolds around. And then if someone originally uses an old 
FONT - which were in the 'long menu' style, and is using an application 
that correctly remembers font names, he takes this to his local service 
bureau and they have NFNTs, will it work?

If the service bureau has NFNT long menus, yes, because the names are the
same, if they have short - no, because there is no way to make the name
'B 1Stone Serif Bold' to '1Stone Serif' with the Bold style option.

So the decision was made - for user safety - to update to NFNTs, but keep
the long menus. This meant that we made 6 fonts for a family like Stone Serif
[plain, bold, italic, italic, semi-bold, and semi-bolditalic]. When placed in
a single suitcase you get 6 FONDs. The main family maps to the main four
[plain, bold, italic, bold-italic]. The Italic FOND has links to bolditalic,
the same style information is kept for the other faces. No one has any
easy answers on how to solve this problem with multiple weights. The ideal
solution would be for applications to remember fonts by PostScript name (then
users can name the screen fonts how they like and there won't be conflicts
when taken to someone elses machines - where they named them differently).
And the font and style choices would be like those in smart art, where it shows
the family name, and build the style list from the FOND which shows all styles/
weights possible.

Well this has probably been a longer response that most wanted, but I wanted to
be clear on what is involved with fonts - a lot.

----

Brian Bezanson						bezanson@adobe.com