Typography Expert 2100 CD

How many fonts are there on the new Typography 2100 CD from iSV? The CD cover says there are 2100. The Font sample viewer, a program which comes on the CD, says there are 2107. On the other hand there are 171 font family names, so it depends on how you count them.

The Typography CD is a massive collection of fonts. It also includes some software to make it easier to use the fonts, plus some font utilities. It costs £31.50, but if you happen to have the Typography 1 CD, you can upgrade to the new collection for just £11.50.

Although some readers who only have a few fonts may be considering buying the CD, because they want a wider selection, most potential customers probably have quite a lot of fonts already.

You don’t need any more fonts!?

Do your friends cry “but you can’t possibly need any more fonts”? Mine do. It’s not that they aren’t interested in DTP, but they have a collection of fonts they use regularly and they see my passion to collect more as a harmless eccentricity. They feel that collecting fonts is a bit like collecting stamps − decorative, enthralling, but not very practical. They are wrong.

Every design job is different. Some people, and I am one, cannot shake off the feeling that some design work they do is ‘right’, some is just ‘OK’ and some is ‘unsatisfactory’. Getting it ‘right’ is much more satisfying for the designer, and perhaps for the people who look at it, even if they don’t understand why it is right. You don’t need technical knowledge to be influenced by good design.

The choice of fonts is part of getting it right, and even quite a fine difference between two fonts can make one font better for a job than the other.

Not all fonts are of equal value. Some fonts are useful in many different circumstances, and some seem suitable in only a few. However, even the most eccentric fonts have a place somewhere.

There was a time when there were only a few fonts available on computers. As more fonts became available, we started to see designs which used many different fonts in the same document. This is hardly ever a good idea. Just because we can use a wide range of fonts, that doesn’t mean we should use them all, all the time.

The advantage of having a wide range of fonts isn’t in being able to use them all at once, but in being able to choose the right one for each task. Provided you can locate and use the right font at right time, you just can’t have too many fonts.

On the CD

The fonts on the CD are organised into ‘groups’. Each group is a collection of font families. The groups are:

There are also a number of programs on the CD. Documentation for the programs is provided in the form of Inform doc reader applications.

Font Utils

The four applications in the Utils directory are concerned with locating and using fonts.

FntCatalog prints a catalogue of all the fonts currently active. It will also print individual font families and tables of all the characters in a chosen font.

Fontview will display an example of any font on the CD.

InstallHD installs a whole group of fonts into a !Font directory on the hard disc.

RunFromCD is a very useful application which allows groups of fonts to be used from the CD. You can change which groups of fonts are active by clicking on the name of the group. Most Acorn programs will handle changes to the current fonts while they are running.

Two bonus applications may also prove useful in choosing the right font. Fontnames gives the name of any PostScript font, which is ‘similar’ to a font on the CD. If firms want to supply exact copies of PostScript fonts they have to pay a licence fee. Hence it is quite common to find fonts with bear more than a passing resemblance to a PostScript font with a name rather similar to the corresponding PostScript one. As I have grown older, I have found that I frequently need a magnifying glass to tell the difference.

There is also a program called Designer which will display a short piece of text in one font with a heading in the same or a different font.

Was it easy to locate and use fonts?

It was certainly very easy to use fonts. I found the RunFromCD application invaluable. I want to show this CD to all my friends with PCs. I think it would be nice to start a piece of desktop publishing, then half-way through the document, announce that a font from the CD would be useful, put the CD in, and use the font immediately. Naturally, when they expressed surprise that this is possible, I’d put on my best blank face and say “I’m sure there’s a way to do this on a PC, isn’t there?”

The font groups are fairly intuitive. If you know what font you want, it is usually easy enough to decide which group it is in, and very easy to make it active.

What wasn’t so easy was to know what fonts I had. iSV have certainly tried hard with this. You can view fonts on the screen, and you can print out catalogues. However, a catalogue of all the fonts is massive (I’ve not got round to printing one) and I don’t need a printout of all the fonts in each family. What I really wanted was a printout of just the ‘regular’ versions of each font. I couldn’t see a way of getting this. I think that printing one is going to be the task of a pleasant day or two over the Christmas holidays.

Some of the files which are used by the applications looked as though they might be useful apart from the application. Inside the FontNames application I found a list of all the font families on the CD in a CSV file with similar PostScript fonts. This has been very useful. In the font directories themselves are text files listing all the fonts in each group. In each individual font directory is a sprite showing the font. These sprites are used by FontView.

The right fonts

There is certainly a wide variety of font families. I was delighted to get an Antique Olive look-alike (note the unusually large x height), and Entity was another useful addition to my collection. Other readers may find this CD fills different gaps for them. It covers a good general range of fonts, so that most types of DTP work can be attempted with just the fonts on this CD. However, my own preference, if I was making up a collection to put on a CD, would be to be more economical with the gothic and western faces.

If you want to see the full list of available fonts, or to read more about this CD, iSV have a website http://members.aol.com/isvproduct/. The site has font viewers of the fonts on the CD, but the size of the files to be downloaded is a bit daunting.

The size of a family

A font family is a collection of related fonts. We are all familiar with the four member Trinity family which is supplied with Acorn computers: Trinity bold, bold.italic, medium and medium.italic. The four member font family − perhaps we should call it the nuclear font family − is considered rather small by most modern books on DTP. They usually recommend an extended family which includes at least light and condensed versions. The members of a font family are often referred to as ‘weights’ of that font.

The benefit of having large font families is not that they can all be used in the same document, but that they give a wider range of alternatives from which to choose. For a particular job, a printer might decide that the black weight was better than the bold, or that the condensed fitted better than the regular face.

The font families on the Typography CD average about dozen members. The biggest family I have found so far is iSVSerif with 24 members.

• iSVSerif.Black.Condensed
• iSVSerif.Black.Condensed.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Black.Extended
• iSVSerif.Black.Extended.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Black
• iSVSerif.Black.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Bold.Condensed
• iSVSerif.Bold.Condensed.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Bold.Extended
• iSVSerif.Bold.Extended.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Bold
• iSVSerif.Bold.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Condensed
• iSVSerif.Condensed.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Extended
• iSVSerif.Extended.Oblique
• iSVSerif
• iSVSerif.Light.Condensed
• iSVSerif.Light.Condensed.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Light.Extended
• iSVSerif.Light.Extended.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Light
• iSVSerif.Light.Oblique
• iSVSerif.Oblique

Even the non-latin families like Greek and Hebrew come with a dozen different weights.

One size fits all

In the days when printers used metal type, each character was first carved on a metal punch at actual size. The punch was used to make lots of stamps (or sorts) of that character. The stamps were set up in frames, inked and pressed against the paper. Incidentally, if a printer found that they didn’t have enough of any character for a job, he was said to be ‘out of sorts’. If, like me, you lost most of the ‘e’s from your John Bull printing outfit, you will recall how frustrating it is to be out of sorts!

The craftsman (it would have been a man in those days) who carved the punches would work from drawings of the letters, trying to reproduce them accurately on metal. He would have to produce a different set of punches for each font size. The type founder who used the punches to make the stamps would produce complete sets of all the characters needed to set text at one size and sell it as a font (also called a fount or fund). A font would usually be one weight plus its italic form and a set of small capitals. We now usually speak of italic as being a separate weight.

You might think that the craftsman who made the punches would try to make the 20 point version of each letter so that it looked just like the 10 point version, but twice as big. Actually he was rather more creative. He would interpret the drawing of the type design slightly differently for each size. If the drawing showed a part of a letter had a very thin line, he would make it as thin as he practically could at 10 point. When he came to cut the 20 point version, he wouldn’t make it twice as thick as the 10 point version, but still as thin as he could.

Similarly he would make the top of the lower case ‘e’ bigger in proportion in very small font sizes. This would have been partly to stop it clogging so easily with ink, but he might also have had aesthetic reasons. In some examples, there were a remarkable number of variations in the different sizes of a font.

These days we don’t buy our fonts in particular sizes. We buy one set of outlines, and the computer scales them to any size we need. This is wonderful because it allows us to collect a massive range of fonts and to use them at absolutely any size we want. No-one has to ruin their eyesight trying to cut a 4 point version of a font. What we lose is a certain degree of variation in the font at different sizes.

Not many people can spot the difference between a font cut for a particular size and a set of outlines scaled to that size. It may be that people who can’t see the difference are affected unconsciously by it, but I don’t know any research which has been done on this. I do know that printers used to believe the differences mattered.

Synthetic families

The different sizes in a font have already become more uniform. We are now seeing the development in the trend towards greater uniformity. Font outlines are the same shape at every size. Now the different weights are beginning to lose their individuality. Some of the members of the font families on the Typography CD have been designed individually, but many of them are simply mathematical transformations of other weights.

The most common transformations are the oblique, extended and condensed weights. I’m not saying that every oblique, condensed and extended weight has been produced by a transformation, but I am pretty sure than many of them have been made this way.

How important is this? Well it is important because it allows iSV to sell us over 2100 fonts for about £30, which is a terrific bargain. On the other hand, some people may feel that use of mathematical transformations to produce fonts gives printed matter a discernible dullness and lack of character. I have found that my confidence in being able to see this difference has declined over the years. It might be that it was always an illusion, but now that most graphics and DTP programs allow us to transform fonts easily, we see these transformations all the time, in magazines and advertisements. Perhaps we have just grown used to a decline in the quality of letter design. Certainly, there has been a dramatic increase in, well, if not the design, then the manufacture, of the shapes of letters.

Other programs

Most DTP programs will allow us to distort fonts, to vary the height to width ratio of fonts, and often to make them oblique and to modify them in other ways. However, it is usually more convenient to have the transformations in the form of actual fonts. iSV have a program to produce transformed fonts very easily. They could hardly be blamed if they kept it securely under their control and sold the fonts produced by the program.

Happily, they have chosen to take a much more generous line and to sell the program. It is called FontTrix Pro. Even more happily, FontTrix Pro is included on this CD along with three other useful programs. I was planning to include a description of the features of FontTrix Pro in this review, but I see that I have already gone on for quite a long time, so perhaps it would be better to reserve that for another article.

On the CD, there is also a full version of the StrongARM-compatible version of FontEd. Using FontEd it is possible to create your own fonts from scratch or to modify existing fonts. The program is supplied freely by Acorn.

There are additional programs to edit the kerning pairs of fonts, and to edit their metric files; these are the files which control the dimensions and spacing of the outlines.

The final program in the tools directory is FontDict − not really a tool at all but an online dictionary of terms associated with typography. It provides some very helpful technical definitions but this illustration shows one of the less technical entries.

Problems

I only had three reservations about this CD, all minor. The first reservation I have already mentioned, that there is no easy way of producing a catalogue of just the regular fonts. Secondly, many of the applications have very similar icons which caused me some confusion at first. Thirdly, and probably most annoyingly, there is one font in the Gylessans open family which has caused a buffer overflow on my machine a few times. I don’t think it is the font definition itself but rather the length of the name, GylesSans.Outline.Bold.Condensed.Oblique, which seems to upset some programs.

It’s not actually a problem with this CD in particular, but when I get new fonts, I would like to know more about them. When were they designed, who by, and were they trying to achieve anything special with this font? For example, Times Roman, which we know as Trinity, wasn’t created by a single individual, although Stanley Morison played a very influential role. It was designed for the Times newspaper. The aim was to produce a font which worked with thin inks on high speed presses while remaining very readable and fitting a lot of words on the page. I suppose I cannot expect this sort of information with every font I buy, but if it were available in a convenient form, I would be happy to pay for it.

Unfinished business

When I agreed to do this review, I told Paul I would tackle the range and type of fonts but not the technical features of the outlines, the hinting and scaffolding, etc. iSV make a great deal in their advertising of their use of the No Dropout Technology expert system in the production of the fonts. Someone who knows more than I do about outline definitions might like to tackle this.

I haven’t written much about FontTrix Pro and the other three tools. One or all of them might form the subject of a future article by me, or by someone else.

Conclusion

I think this CD is excellent value. It is true that I think just about every CD font collection I see is excellent value, but I don’t see how that can be helped.

I should say that I have no professional experience of the printing trade; I am an enthusiastic amateur, and all the comments above are ‘in my humble opinion’.