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Font family, style issues


jprothero

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I am using a font called TFForeverTwo, an OpenType font, which has both medium and light attributes.

 

Font1.PNG

 

In FP, I have one line of copy that is in medium (the name) and the line below is in light (title), but I cannot select the medium or light options in the font pull down.

 

Font2.PNG

 

The font is correct in InDesign, so is there something in the export process?

Edited by jprothero
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FusionPro doesn't really differentiate between "Medium" and "Light" font styles, at least not on Windows.

 

In other words, like most other Windows apps (such as Word), FusionPro deals with font families, not with individual font files. A font family needs to have styles with separate bold and italic flags to differentiate them. So you can have up to four styles, or faces (Regular/Normal/Medium/Plain, Bold, Italic, and Bold + Italic) in a font family.

 

In FusionPro's HTML-like tagged markup system, you have <b> and <i> tags, and corresponding B and I buttons on the Variable Text Editor, to switch to bold and italic versions (faces) of a font within the selected family. This is all based on the idea that you should be able to specify that some particular text should be in bold or italic, regardless of what font family it's in, just like you can underline any text in any font.

 

So if one the fonts in your family was style Bold, then you could select that (and differentiate it from the "Medium" style) by pressing the "B" button in the Text Editor. But there's no "Light" style button to click like there is for "Bold."

 

In FusionPro on Mac, you can access all of the individual font files separately, by style, even if there are more than four styles in the family, as Mac fonts tend to not be family-oriented. But on Windows, you are still limited to up to four styles per family, where the styles have unique combinations of the bold and italic flags.

 

Some fonts are designed so that different styles (outside of the usual four) actually have different family names, in order to allow Windows programs to handle them separately. But it seems that your font was not made that way.

 

Also, InDesign and other Adobe apps works differently than most other Windows applications, with a more Mac-like way of handling individual font styles instead of families on both Windows and Mac. And it's also true that more Windows applications (and Windows itself) are moving in the direction of Adobe and Apple to use individual font styles instead of being family-centric. Later versions of apps like Word use a hybrid approach, where some fonts that are really in the same family appear to be in a different family in the font drop-down list, but this is not based on any standard. The bottom line is that Windows and Mac have historically handled fonts in completely different ways, and different applications deal with that in different ways, and how to knock down this particular Tower of Babel is still not settled in the computer industry.

 

We have talked about changing FusionPro to allow individual font selection on Windows as well as on Mac. But that would be a fundamental change to how FusionPro has always worked on Windows, so it's not something we want to rush.

 

More explanation about the differences in font handling between Windows and Mac from Adobe:

https://helpx.adobe.com/legacy/kb/font-style-linking.html

Also:

http://www.adobe.com/products/type/opentype/opentype-fonts-information.html#subtitle_2

Edited by Dan Korn
Added link to Adobe tech notes.
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Thanks, Dan. A suggestion was made to send the offensive font to one of our team members to convert it from a stylized font to two individual fonts, via a Mac. Is that possible though? :confused:

Well, they already are two individual fonts: one called "TFForeverTwo Medium" and another called "TFForeverTwo Light". The issue is that they both have the same family name of "TFForeverTwo". What you can do as a workaround is to use some kind of font utility to change the family name of one them. For instance, you could change the one with the full name of "TFForeverTwo Light" to also have a family name of "TFForeverTwo Light" (which is probably how it shows up in FusionPro on Mac). There are font utility programs on both Windows and Mac that can do what you need; I would probably start with FontForge.

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