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In article <cZyo5eC00WBLE1o1kH@andrew.cmu.edu> ls1i+@andrew.cmu.edu (Leonard John Schultz) writes:
>I have alot of screenfonts, but the way the Mac puts different styles
>into the font menus is very confusing.  For example, the LetterGothic
>show up in the menu as:
>B Letter Gothic Bold
>BI Letter Gothic Bold Italic
>I Letter Gothic Italic
>Letter Gothic
>
>where Times just shows up as Times.
>
>My question is, why do the different styles for some fonts show up in
>the font menu and others don't.  The menu gets increadibly cluttered
>with a significant number of fonts.

It's not the Mac's fault that your fonts have separate menu entries for
each style variation.  That's just the way Adobe (and perhaps other
type vendors) distributes them.

When you think about it, a true italic or bold typeface really is
separate from the plain style of that typeface. Unfortunately, many
Mac users have become accustomed to the standard quickdraw way of
generating italics (i.e. just slant all the plain characters over towards the
right. Yuck!).  Originally, the only way to display *real* italics and other
style variations was to have separate fonts, hence "I Letter Gothic Italic"
(I guess the preceding "I" (or "B" or "BI" or "C", etc.) is so all similarly-
styled fonts will be grouped together in the fonts menu).

However, now that NFNTs have come along, it is possible to have "families"
of fonts, with the relationships between fonts made explicit in the NFNT
resource.  With the aid of utilities like Font Harmony, you can merge
all your style variations into a single NFNT and get true italics on-screen
in the usual way (choose the font, then the italic style).  Personally, I
like having the individual styles in the font menu (as long as I can access
the fonts in a dialog box with a scrolling list, since long scrolling menus 
are slow and difficult to deal with).

Additionally, you can replace your Apple-supplied Times, Palatino, etc. fonts
with the Adobe-supplied NFNT versions, and get true italics on-screen (and
you won't need to use Font Harmony, just Font/DA mover 3.8).  The reason
style variations of these fonts have never appeared in your menus is because
Apple doesn't even supply the styled versions of the screen fonts.

Finally, you can also use Adobe Type manager to reduce your menu clutter.
Just install ATM and only the plain versions of the screen fonts and ATM
will be able to generate the styled versions using the downloadable printer
fonts (although not as nicely as bitmap fonts at small point sizes).


Hope this helps,
-- 
Steve Kanefsky             
kanefsky@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu