How to Group Widths and Weights as font styles inside one Typeface

[outofstepfontco]

We did post it once to the forum and it is also described in more recent versions of the FontCreator manual.

How to make fonts work like a family?

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 10 fonts:

GreatFace.png

All these settings and flags can be modified through the settings on the Font Properties dialog.

On the Identification tab:

• Font Subfamily
• Weight
• Bold checkbox
• Italic checkbox
• Italic Angle

On the Characteristics tab:

• PANOSE Weight

Hi Erwin
Thank you for posting a response to this issue considering you have had to address it in the past. I have read through many of those explanations, including the directions you’ve just provided.

I’m not able to achieve usable results with the direction you have provided, although the chart shows the correct solution. The primary issue is that multiple weights and widths can’t exist in the same Font Family and Font Subfamily without confusing a program like Photoshop.

After analyzing the Family Names and Weight Postscript Name information for Myriad and Helvetica using an alternate font editor, I have come up with the solution. The alternate weights and widths can be included in a Font Family without overwrite existing fonts as follows:

1. Identification > Font Family
   Each width or weight MUST HAVE its own Font Family. For example, Myriad Pro has Myriad Pro Light, Myriad Pro Cond, and Myriad Pro. In your example you have Greatface Narrow and Greatface Light to prevent confusing the software. This isn’t specified anywhere.

2. Extended > Additional Naming > Typographic Family
   This is the secret to unifying your fonts. The top two lines on the Extended Page must be filled out. The “Typographic Family” field will be the name of the font that all variations will share in Adobe programs. It MUST be the same across all fonts. Failure to set the Typographic Family to be identical on all variations will result in Font Families appearing on separate lines in software. This direction is also absent from all resources.

3. Extended > Typographic Subfamily
   This is how you get each font to have it’s own name in your programs. This field will be displayed in the software to describe the font style. You don’t have to put the name of the font here. This is where you put the style, like “Bold”, “Ultra Condensed”, “Extended”, “Bold Italic”, etc. No mention of this in any of the resources I was able to find.

Hopefully this explicit explanation can assist people in building larger font families without encountering frustration.

In order to reduce the number of future posts on the subject, the keyword that I used to research this topic was “subfamily”. This keyword may help your official solution be more visible.