I’ve found the free Baron font and downloaded it. It’s 6 .otf files. Unfortunately, the files each define a different font family so they appear as 6 independent entries in font family lists of applications. The Bold and Italic style buttons in MS Word for example did nothing useful. I tried to correct that by setting the family and subfamily to the correct names. I’ve also set the Italic and Bold checkboxes accordingly.
Unfortunately, the “Regular” style can only be used if it’s the only one that’s installed in Windows. As soon as I also install “Italic”, both will be rendered as italic, no matter which I select. “Bold”, “Bold Italic”, “Black” and “Black Italic” work just fine. It’s only the “Regular” that is overwritten by “Italic”.
I have worked with a number of fonts and none had this issue. I’ve tried with and without setting the extended typographic family and subfamily information. I’ve tested on Windows 7 and 10 and both show identical behaviour. I could attach these two edited files if you want to try it out for yourself.
What might be the problem here? Maybe I have missed some other metadata field that’s just set to an unfortunate wrong value and conflicts both fonts, I don’t know.
In what application did you test the fonts? I can install them as often as I want, in any order, but Microsoft Word will only show the italic font. The italic toolbar button has no effect at all on this font in Normal weight. The fonts appear correctly in the Windows control panel Fonts view, but they’re not usable in applications that only know the four basic styles. The selection works in Illustrator, for example, because it knows to real styles.
I’ve done that a few times already. PagePlus looks like it could use most font features and not just the four basic styles. I’ve done more tests now. Microsoft Word still can’t show the non-italic font. But Windows Notepad and WordPad and Excel can do it just fine. So maybe it’s a Word problem? Does Word react sensitive to some features of a font? Never seen such misbehaviour before.
I have now tried it on another computer that has never seen a font with this name. And it’s chaotic. I’ve installed all six files by dragging them into the Fonts control panel window. Then I opened Word 2010 to select the font. In the font list, all Baron fonts (1. basic 4 styles and 2. additional Black) are shown in italic. When I select the styles, the Regular and Italic work normally. These are the two that did not work on my other systems. But then again all other styles are messed up. Bold and Bold Italic are displayed as Bold Italic; Black and Black Italic are displayed as Black Italic.
In WordPad (not Office Word), the fonts can be selected correctly, but the dropdown list also shows them all in italic.
paint.net shows the fonts correctly in the dropdown list, but the Italic style is not used. Instead a fake auto-generated style is displayed.
The font files must be defective in some way. Maybe that’s why the original author used six separate family names to keep them apart. I have attached all six styles in case somebody wants to try. Unfortunately the font designer is not reachable anymore since he published the files some two years ago. Baron.zip (157 KB)
The original files have a separate family name for each file. So there’s no issue at all. Except that the font taks six lines in font selection lists.
My changes are only about the name and descriptions of the files. And these files cause issues on every computer I’ve tried so far. Different issues everywhere, but none works correctly.
I’ve tried them (after deleting the Office font cache which improved things slightly) and they work in Word 2010. I’d just expect that the Black and Black Italic would be listed in the same family and could be selected with the italic format button. They’re two separate families now. If I try to fix that, the Black Italic is still not accessible.
What’s so complicated with these particular fonts?
Whatever you have done, it didn’t work out too well. Now I only have “Baron Neue” and no Black anymore. Also, there’s just a single bolder weight which can be regular or italic. Funny that Windows control panel now displays cyrillic glyphs as preview but that doesn’t have to say much. Some normal fonts only have math symbols there.
So what did you change the last time? I’d like to know what I need to watch out for.
Ok. I give up trying to get word to handle more than 4 styles in a family. Unless I can find a larger family that word recognizes and can apply properly, I would recommend making the black styles into its own family.
Yes, that’s what Word and most other simple (non-typographic) Windows programs require. It works well in all other fonts. But not in this one.
I might as well give up, too, and just accept that the font takes six independent font entries and style selection is not possible at all (not even the four basic styles) through the common controls. Nice looking font, stupidly engineered, impossible to fix.
If I knew enough about font metrics and other metadata, it might be possible to use all glyph outlines only and put them in a completely new font file. But that’s probably not worth the effort.
Here’s a screen shot of my font Kabala, with a family of eight styles, displayed in LibreOffice. That doesn’t yet support OpenType features, but it looks like a better choice than Word. If you get Serif PagePlus X8 then you can stop messing about with Word.
