Fonts naming, settings & flags.

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Mike F.
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Joined: Thu Nov 21, 2002 7:39 pm
Location: Washington state, USA

Fonts naming, settings & flags.

Post by Mike F. »

At the following URL is a very nice frreebie font family:
http://inde-graphics.deviantart.com/art ... t-57338302

The usage guidelines are toward the bottom of the page. They disallow the opening and alteration of the font(s) in an editor - so I'm going to have to talk theoretically here.

The family contains seven fonts - a Regular, three lighter and three heavier weights. As provided, they all share the same family name, 'advent'. The creator of the fonts has then given them each a different subfamily name and set the Classification/Weight to match that. Individually, then, the fonts are fine. The trouble, of course (at least in Windows), is that when several are opened at once, they appear as a single entry in a font menu.

So ... if I were theoretically going to have tried to have all seven fonts be accessible and usable from a font menu, I would have changed the naming such that each weight were part of the Family name and the Subfamily for all of them was Regular.

I have, indeed, done so with a remarkably similar font family and now all seven fonts are listed in the font menu of my apps, but, while the Regular and three bolder fonts display and print properly, the three lighter weights - named Light, Extra Light and Thin - do NOT display or print properly, no matter what I've tried.

It doesn't seem to make any difference whether the Regular flag is set or not for the six non-Regular fonts, but it's my understanding from FC's documentation that the Regular flag should not be set for any of those six.

Incidentally, I did try having the variant I named Bold named with the Subfamily as Bold and the Bold flag checked, but that, for some reason, screwed up the display of the three heavier weights. So I went back to having Bold as part of the Family name, the Subfamily as Regular and the Bold (and Regular) flags unchecked - which fixed the problem.

Any ideas on what one would do with a font family like this to get the three light weights to display and print properly when all seven fonts are open? I'm out of ideas.
Peter Rempel
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Joined: Fri Apr 05, 2013 5:06 pm

Re: Fonts naming, settings & flags.

Post by Peter Rempel »

Good question, I have the same one, but not an answer. I am working on a font with 8 different weights. the font editing software, whether Font Creator, or Fontlab allows a choice of regular or bold as weight. There is an option to allows for other weights in the subfamily field, which are not exactly the same as the Panose standard, with light and thin being transposed.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Fonts naming, settings & flags.

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

If you want to separate the font family, just use different family names, e.g.

Arial
Arial Light
Arial Semibold
Arial Bold
Arial Extra Bold

or Like Bitstream fonts:
Zurich BT.png
Zurich BT.png (17 KiB) Viewed 4901 times
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Fonts naming, settings & flags.

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Windows comes with several typefaces (font families) that are made up with more than 4 fonts. To name a few; Calibri contains 6 fonts, Segoe UI comes with 12 fonts and Sitka is king with 24 fonts.

The trick to make this work is fairly straightforward; however you need to be consistent.

For example a typeface named "GreatFace" with 8 fonts:
typeface.png
typeface.png (16.74 KiB) Viewed 4897 times
fontname1.png
fontname1.png (20.19 KiB) Viewed 4893 times
fontname2.png
fontname2.png (12.42 KiB) Viewed 4893 times
Mistakes are easy to make, if I'm correct even Segoe UI Light has a flaw, as the PANOSE Weight is set to "5- Book" while it is supposed to be set to "3 - Light" :o
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FontFamilyNaming.pdf
(132.73 KiB) Downloaded 397 times
Erwin Denissen
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