Seattle InDesign User Group Meeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
OpenType® With Thomas Phinney
Adobe's Thomas Phinney gave a great presentation on OpenType technology and typography. He traced the history of the font technology from its creation through the “Font Wars” of the 1990s to the present day, when we have broadening support for the diverse capabilities that OpenType offers.
OpenType fonts offer many features appealing to us users: cross-platform and multilingual support, extended characters sets, and more characters in a font to work with. OpenType files are cross-platform: The same file can be used on either a Mac or a Windows machine and type will now work the same way when files move from one platform to the other. An OpenType font may also have extended character sets to support Cyrillic, Arabic, or other type systems. And an OpenType font may have variations of characters: real small caps, real all caps, or even intelligent fraction systems. In the past we’d have to use expert font sets to use some of these features, or we'd have to insert ligatures manually. Once these changes were made, you could not run spell-check. But with an OpenType font you can! Your type looks better, is more dynamic, and yet is also as flexible as ever.
InDesign® was the first application to support OpenType. We used to have to put these fonts into InDesign’s fonts folder because our operating systems didn’t support the font technolgy. Nowadays, many modern versions of Windows and Mac OS X support OpenType natively. OS support is only one step in the process though, Applications have to support OpenType and Unicode to take full advantage of OpenType. InDesign, Photoshop® CS, Illustrator® CS, Premiere®, AfterEffects®, and Office can take advantage of OpenType. Some applications, including PageMaker®, FrameMaker®, and QuarkXPress® may be able to use an OpenType font, but since they don’t support Unicode, they cannot use the special features of these fonts.
Adobe has converted over 2,200 fonts to OpenType, and many other font foundries are now making or shipping OpenType fonts as well. InDesign CS ships with a selection of OpenType fonts, Illustrator CS has even more, and, if you buy the Creative Suite you get additional OpenType fonts.
As you work with the current Adobe CS applications, the fonts list may alphabetize your fonts oddly. A couple of things are going on. Adobe Garamond Pro will be listed under “G” for Garamond, not “A” for Adobe — the type foundry’s name is not part of the sort order. There are two suffixes you might see on an OpenType name, “Std” and “Pro.” “Pro” indicates an extended character set and more OpenType features than in an “Std” version of the font. And you might find fonts alphabetized in groups.
Special Speed-Demo by Triple Triangle
We squeezed a fast demo from Triple Triangle in after Thomas was done. Chris Jones and Joe Shankar ran us quickly through two of their plug-ins: Spec and Slug. The demo and plugins are so intriguing that we’re going to have Chris and Joe back in July and let them give a big demo. While Spec creates visual style guides for InDesign layouts, Slug creates and maintains document information for an InDesign file.
Thanks for the Ideas!
For those of you who have topics you’d like to see presented or questions for the next meeting, please email those to our chapter representative. We’ll address those, and any others that come up, at the next meeting.
Thanks for the Prizes!
Thanks to Adobe, Triple Triangle, and Total Training, people walked away with some great software and training resources.
And Thanks for the Help!
Thanks to Sheila, Teresa, Gene, David, and Samuel for helping out with the meeting. This help is really important in making the meeting easier to run and organize. We also thank Adobe for the facility, the pizza, the support, and the incredible InDesign resources we have here in Seattle — we’re really lucky! Anyone interested in helping out with the meeting, or anyone with an idea for a future topic, send an email to our chapter representative.
Photos From This Meeting!
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
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