Bay Area InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Thursday, March 6, 2003
This meeting was held at Adobe HQ, San Jose.
Type
We were invited down to Adobe HQ for an evening to discuss type and font handling. We really are lucky living in the Bay Area and having access to the source of much of the technology we use, not to mention such a wealth of local expertise.
Social Time
We started off the meeting with our usual pizza and social time. The pizza was courtesy of Sandy Bozek of Apple Computer. Thanks, Sandy! Thanks again to Monika Wolf and Jennifer Wills of W+W Consulting for bringing the soft drinks.
Presentations
Steve Werner
Steve gave a great presentation on font types and a brief overview of the history of fonts. It was an excellent introduction to the evening. He covered the history of PostScript® and TrueType® fonts and why they pose problems in cross-platform environments, and further, why Unicode and OpenType® offer advancements in font handling. Steve is co-author with David Blatner of the upcoming book InDesign for QuarkXPress Users, a book I'm looking forward to seeing. I can think of several people to send this to as a present! Steve also teaches classes at Rapid Lasergraphics in San Francisco.
Harold Grey
Group Project Manager, Publishing Platform, Cross-Media Publishing, Adobe Systems Incorporated
It was a pleasure and an honor to have Harold give a presentation to the group. He addressed how OpenType’s base in Unicode is a more reliable typographic experience because it eliminates cross-platform issues, and provides better language support and access to a larger character set.
Harold and Thomas Phinney also covered many of the fine typographic controls unique to InDesign®. Some of the features covered were:
- Hanging punctuation and optical margin alignment (Type/Story/Optical Margin Alignment checked) – (note: select same size as font used in story)
- Multiline Composer (via the paragraph options fly-out palette, called Adobe Paragraph Composer)
- Optical Kerning (note: you can apply optical kerning to one pair as well as to entire selections)
- Insert Glyph palette (Type/Insert Glyphs) (interesting note: if you select an alternate via the Insert Glyph palette and then change the font, the alternate will still apply, provided that the new font selected carries the alternate)
For more information of InDesign features, try some of these online resources:
http://www.indesignusergroup.com/tips/adobe/tutorials/int_tutorials.html
http://www.adobe.com/misc/training.html
(check out the expert center)
Thomas W. Phinney
Fonts Program Manager, Adobe Systems Incorporated
As an extra bonus, Thomas also contributed his vast expertise to the InDesign and OpenType discussions.
Sandy Bozek
Marketing Manager, Design and Print, World Wide Markets, Apple
Sandy is very dynamic and personable, and her presentation of font management in OS X was a great finale. I thought I knew enough about fonts in OS X, but discovered I still had more than a thing or two to learn.
It is more than worthwhile to download the following PDF document, “Using and Managing Fonts in Mac OS X,” a guide for creative professionals.
Of particular note is the handling of Apple’s dFonts. (tip: do not remove Lucida Grande as the OS uses this font.) The new Character Palette is worth looking into, although in InDesign we have the Insert Glyph palette. See Peter below for more information.
Peter Lofting
Font Guy, International & Text Group, Apple
Peter is an engineer at Apple, and offered additional information about fonts. (Love his title!) Peter forwarded the following to me regarding dFonts and font activation.
Depending on your setup, there may be no need to remove the OS X system fonts. If you’re in a pre-press production environment that receives multiple customer jobs, you may still want to follow the font removal procedures. However, if you’re a designer, you may want to take advantage of the extended character sets in the system fonts. You can leave the system fonts in place and simply override them with your version by using the location precedence order described below. This leaves the original system font set intact for times when you may need to reactivate them, such as to take advantage of their extended repertoires for language support.
With OS X — unlike the old days when there was only one font location — all you need to do now is put your own fonts in a higher-priority location, and then they will be used in preference to the system fonts.
For your reference, here is the order of priority, with locations higher up the list taking priority over lower ones (i.e. user fonts override system fonts).
0. [Application-specific font directories] (Application)
1. ~/Library/Fonts (User)
2. /Library/Fonts (Local)
3. /Network/Library/Fonts (Network)
4. /System/Library/Fonts (System)
5. [Classic System Folder]/Fonts (Classic)
Another useful tip for interested font users is that Apple has a free font tool called ftxinstalledfonts available for download that can tell you the filename and location of every font that is active in the system. This is great for double-checking that the versions you want are the ones that are active and for finding and weeding out any spare fonts that may have been installed by applications.
 |
Apple Font Tool Suite
For a wealth of information.
http://developer.apple.com/
fonts/OSXTools.html
After running the Tool Suite installer, launch the terminal application and type:
ftxinstalledfonts -flrq
This will give you a list of all fonts in the system, showing their full name, FOND (QuickDraw) name, version name and directory location. There are lots of other options you can find out about by reading the documents and tutorial provided with the Apple Font Tool Suite.
|
People
Each meeting I like to list some of the people at the meeting. I try to list companies from the industry to show thanks for their support, but I'd also like to say thanks to the members. Please come up and introduce yourself at the next meeting and give me your card.
Adobe Systems Incorporated
A few of the Adobe people present and I’m sure I missed quite a few: Alan Felgate, Maria Yap, David Lemmon, Will Eisley, Lonn Lorenz, Dov Isaacs.
Special thanks to Lonn for making sure the meeting ran smoothly and for the copies of the Adobe Type Library Reference Book.
Font Reserve
Clifford Kaplan and Chelsea Cleland of Font Reserve (DiamondSoft) were present. Font Reserve's home is in my neighborhood over in Mill Valley. Clifford and Chelsea were enthusiastic about the group and offered their support and participation for a future meeting.
Clint Applegate
Photographs of this meeting were taken by designer Clint Applegate. Clint is the new court artisan of the steering committee.
Sylvie Girard
Designer Sylvie Girard assumed her position as Vizier of the Treasury by checking in attendees and selling raffle tickets. Thanks!
Steve Sloan
IT Consultant at San Jose State University School of Journalism.
Steve helped out by reading off possible InDesign meeting topics from his notes taken at our first meeting.
Michael S. Witherell
Publishing consulting and training with JetSet Communications, Inc.
Michael dropped in all the way from Washington, D.C.
Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
See the photos.
Meeting Notes Archive
View notes from past meetings of the San Francisco InDesign user group.
• Read notes from other meetings!
Meeting Topics Archive
With user group chapters across the United States, Europe, and Australia, we have gathered quite a bit of information from presenters, Adobe representatives, attendees, and industry experts during the past four years.
• Read all of the notes
| 
