Seattle InDesign User Group

Meeting Summary

May Meeting
Tue, May 13th, 2008 at 6:30 PM
Adobe University

Event Details

Special note for those who've been wondering about a Photoshop User Group: Now there is one! To attend, see: photoshop.meetup.com/248/join.

6.30-6.35: Meet, Greet, & Eat

6.35-6.50: 15 minutes of Fame: Teresa Anderson presented the steps she took to prepare her first book: a poetry book with her original illustrations. Teresa told us what InDesign features made her life easier in that process.

6.55-7.10: 15 minutes of Fame: Becky Dobbins presented the work she did for her furniture-maker customer, illustrating the design process she used for the benefit of those who wonder just what it is that designers do.

7.15-7.50: Steve improvised, answering questions to fill in the time allotted for two member presenters who couldn’t be present. As your reporter arrived, he was presenting on the interesting nature of exporting as xHTML. Following Becky’s presentation, there was a lot of interest in the export of a document’s content to xHTML for reformatting using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Steve endeavored to explain the quirks of that process.

7.50-8.00: break and chat

8.00-8.45: Featured speaker

OpenType with Thomas Phinney, Adobe Product Manager for Fonts and Global Typography

Phinney has been with Adobe for 11 years, and touches all aspects of typography: technical, historical, aesthetic and commercial. He designed the very lovely Hypatia Sans Pro.

The three characteristics that distinguish OpenType fonts are:
1. Single file, cross-platform fonts
2. Unicode encoding
3. There can be up to 64,000+ glyphs in a single font, including alternate and various language glyphs.

His presentation covered Basic OpenType, Alternate features and Wild Stuff.

Part I: Introduction to OpenType

In the introductory section, Thomas covered ligatures, which evolved to resolve spacing problems between letters. He also explained discretionary and historic ligatures.

He demonstrated the difference between true small caps (the strokes remain consistent) and faux small caps (the strokes get thinner).

A fundamental characteristic of OpenType fonts is that the text is transferable. Type can be switched to a different font and OpenType will preserve the underlying text. The same is true if type is exported to a PDF.

Figures come in four flavors:
1. Tabular lining figures (line up in vertical columns)
2. Proportional lining figures
3. Proportional old style figures (they have ascenders and descenders)
4. Tabular old style figures

Fonts with “Pro” and (the unfortunate) “Std” after their names are OpenType fonts (e.g., Adobe Caslon Pro, Utopia Std, Poetica Std)

Ordinals (1st, 2nd 3rd) also have faux versus real versions, as do fractions. Never turn fractions or ordinals on globally, as all nonfractions will become numerators.

Part II: Advanced OpenType

Poetica used to be 27 different fonts. Now it’s one font with 11 levels of variation(!) , mostly in “swashiness.”

Some brief notes:
Hypatia Sans has vestigial serifs (a fine phrase!)
The Glyphs panel is your friend.
Contextual ligatures: For example, in Caflish, the swashes only show up in certain letter combinations. The font is coded to recognize the context and choose a swash.
Bickham Script is also context sensitive, as can be any OpenType font.
Contextual alternatives are on by default.
About 119 OpenType fonts come with CS3. (Look for them on the install media.)
You have to use metric kerning on script fonts.

Phinney showed us Zapfino Extra Pro, Dear Sara, Ministry Script, Miss AmyLynn.

Part III: The Cool and the Weird: Stunt fonts

Just as OpenType fonts may replace letter pairs or triplets with ligatures, they may replace larger chunks. So Thomas demonstrated a few fonts with some dramatic replacements...only some of these are publicly available. Ed Interlock (Benguiat). Automatically interlocks letters; it has 1100 ligatures!

Beowulf OT. (Letterror) Eight alternatives for each letter. Was that an arm dangling off the cap B?
Shy slacker. (Amy Papaelis)
Francophile. Translates some words into French. (“Bon bye”!)
Myriad Censored. What the hello!
Mystic (P22) Answers questions Swami style.
Cranky Kid. Emulates 5-year old writing and verbal interaction. Cool, in small doses.

Summary: Not just cute tricks; OpenType automates high-quality typography.

8.30-8.45: Thomas Phinney Q&A

User asked about better design for OpenType flyouts (too many submenus). Phinney suggested submitting a feature request.

User asked about how to keep track of keyboard shortcuts for Zapf Dingbats (where the letter n = black square), but regrettably, the cost of the consistency that OpenType gives us means that some Type 1 font shortcuts will not work. OpenType is coded in special Adobe software that uses feature code language; many type designers are in-house at Adobe. (Robert Slimbach, Richard Lipton).

How do you know what you’re getting when you buy a font? (From Adobe, there’s a teal blue icon that reveals information about font features.

8.45-9.00: High-Speed Raffle: In Copy books, keyboard shortcuts poster, InDesign CS3 software.