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March 15, 2005

The March meeting of the Milwaukee chapter of the InDesign® user group was held at C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions (C2GPS). As in the past, C2 provided not only space for the meeting, but food and refreshments as well. Topics for this meeting included an explanation and demonstration of OpenType® fonts by Tom Petrillo of Adobe Systems and an examination of font management techniques for OS X presented by Jim Conway, co-owner of C2GPS.

Tom Petrillo began his interesting discussion of OpenType fonts with an explanation of their basic characteristics. Some points of interest include:

1. OpenType fonts are cross-platform and designed to reproduce identically on Mac and PC platforms. This cannot be said of Type 1 fonts, which are Mac- and PC-specific and bear subtle differences in appearance.
2. There are two types of OpenType fonts: Standard (Std) and Pro. the “Standard” fonts are a compilation of Type 1 suitcase fonts. The “Pro” version of OpenType fonts have been rexamined and have additional items such as discretionary ligatures, swashes, figures, fractions, and ordinals.

Tom continued his demonstration with examples of the discretionary ligatures, swashes, figures, fractions, and ordinals available with OpenType. One item of particular interest was the fact that fractions are actually live text that is fully editable, which is not true of past incarnations of fraction representations. It was further demonstrated that ordinals are intelligent with OpenType and InDesign. An example of this is that the ordinal related to “4th” cannot be displayed as “4rd” or “4st”. These discretionary features can be activated from the fly-out menu associated with OpenType on the Character palette.

At this point Tom moved on to display many of the features related to the Glyphs palette in InDesign. It was noted that in addition to the Glyphs palette displaying the entire character set associated with OTF fonts, it is possible to limit the display to selected types of characters by choosing the appropriate group from the Show pull-down menu at the top of the palette — very useful to minimize the displayed characters when searching for a particular element! A demonstration of the functionality of custom glyph sets was also included in the discussion.

Other points of interest related to Adobe's current font library and strategies:

• The entire Adobe font library is now in OpenType format.
• OpenType fonts are not currently supported for UNIX platforms.
• Type 1 fonts are currently being phased out.
• Multiple Master fonts are phased out.
• A “few” OpenType fonts are included with the InDesign install, but the install of Illustrator® CS and/or the Creative Suite includes more than 100 OpenType fonts.
• OpenType fonts are denoted by a distinctive logo and the extension “.otf” and are comprised by one font document (similar to TrueType) as opposed to the Screen and Printer fonts associated with Type 1 fonts.
• Fonts created before approximately 1992 are not supported by the CS versions of Adobe applications.

After a short break, the meeting continued with Jim Conway's informative presentation related to font management for OS X.

Jim opened his presentation by providing the group with a search string that will return what are currently considered the best reference materials for font management in OS X.

A Google search on “font typography extensis best practice mac os x pdf" returned the following PDF documents:

Apple Computer presents: Using and Managing Fonts in Mac OS X A guide for creative professionals Download PDF file Approximately 3.1 Mb download

Apple Computer presents: Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Using and managing fonts. Download PDF file Approximately 2.8 Mb download

Extensis presents: Font Management in Mac OS X: Best Practices Guide With Mac OS X, professional workflows involving fonts have become seemingly more difficult and confusing, resulting in delays and problems for users. This is especially true for Mac OS 9 users who are just now making the transition. Download PDF file Approximately 721 Kb download

Sells Printing Company presents: Using and Managing Fonts in Mac OS X Best practices for font management Download PDF file Approximately 654 Kb download

These documents describe the various locations that the Mac OS uses to store fonts. They also recommend reducing the installed fonts on your system to minimal configurations, opting to manage font usage with the use of font management utilities. Fonts that must remain active on a system level and never be removed are identified, and the order that the Mac OS follows when searching for a needed font is discussed.

In addition to paring down font usage to a minimal configuration Jim also made the following recommendations and observations:

• The Mac OS can support 100 to 150 active fonts at a system level without font management.
• Although touted by Apple in the above documentation, Font Book, the Apple font utility, should be avoided. If 200+ fonts are active, the use of the “Resolve Duplicates” command in Font Book can corrupt your operating system, necessitating a system reinstall.
• OS 10.3.8 is the latest and the recommended operating system for Mac OS. A clean install should be performed to bring older machines up to this level. Previous versions of the Mac OS X operating system have included font bugs that have now been resolved.
• Perhaps the most important and effective step that can be taken to minimize font conflicts is to inspect and clean up your font libraries. This is a very laborious process that can be done either manually or through font utilities such as Suitcase or Font Reserve. Optimal libraries should include only OpenType and PostScript Type 1 (printer and screen) fonts with no duplicates.
• Remove True Type and dfonts except as described in the documentation listed above.
• Delete “AdobeFnt.Lst” files that you may find in various places in your system. These are cache files that can be deleted without consequence. There are various utilities available that will search and delete these file on your system. Search http://www.versiontracker.com for a suitable cache clearing tool.

Some OS X applications require that Helvetica, Courier, Symbol and Zaph Dingbats are available. These dfonts should be replaced with a Type 1 or OpenType fonts, moved to a logical location, and permanently activated with the aid of a font management tool.

The meeting concluded with a question and answer session moderated by Tom Petrillo and Jim Conway in which User Group members inquired about font issues specific to their workflows.

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