Thought font problems were a thing of the past? Wrong. Even after ten years of desktop publishing, fonts still cause headaches.
Bob Schaffel and Chuck Weger
Next to the holy grail of color management, font management is high on the wish list of most graphic-arts professionals. Fonts are all too often a production problem, even after ten years of desktop typography and publishing. And there's no sign of relief in sight.
First, some basics: On your Mac today, there are four types of font-related files -- bitmap (screen) fonts, PostScript (printer) fonts, TrueType (annoying) fonts, and font suitcases composed of any number of bitmap and/or TrueType fonts. OK, we lied: There can be AFM (Adobe Font Metrics) files too. To complicate things, multiple-master and QuickDraw GX fonts are derivatives of PostScript and TrueType fonts.
Although some businesspeople might be satisfied with Ralph's Must-Have Collection of 2,499 TrueType Fonts, those of us who use imagesetters have standardized on PostScript fonts. And there's the rub. PostScript fonts are schizophrenic by nature, because they consist of both a printer font and a screen font. Without the screen font, we won't see the font name in the menu. Without the printer font, Adobe Type Manager (ATM) won't display different sizes of the font properly and the PostScript code won't be downloaded to the output device.
If we were designers and you were running a print shop, we would need to send you both sets of files -- the screen and the printer fonts -- to guarantee that the job would print correctly. But that's illegal, at least with most font licenses today. We could send you the screen font, because that's where kerning pairs are kept, but it's not OK to send the printer font. People still do it, just as people still run red lights. But if you get caught, don't say we didn't warn you.
OK, so you -- the printer -- own the entire Adobe font library. Now we don't need to send you the printer font, right? Maybe. Suppose we sent you a screen font from another font vendor that happened to have the same name as your Adobe printer font. (How many versions of Garamond do you suppose are out there?) You'd be using our Garamond screen font with your Adobe printer font, and chances are that the font metrics wouldn't be the same. You'd wind up with strange-looking text, and we designers wouldn't pay the bill!
How can you prevent this? As is the case in many preflight situations, eternal vigilance is the price of PostScript. First, do a Get Info on the screen font we sent. It might have information there that identifies the font manufacturer and version number. But what if it doesn't have that information? What if we'd put the screen font into a suitcase file, for example?
For QuarkXPress users, there's Quark PS Utilities, a collection that contains a very handy XTension called PostScript Font Usage. It actually queries the output device to make sure the fonts used in the document are resident where they need to be.
If you're not connected to an output device or you're running another program, you'll have to dig deeper. Use one of the many font-listing utilities (such as Lupin Software's In That Case or Gregg Swann's great FONDetective, both shareware, available online) to determine the PostScript font name associated with the screen font. It tells us, for example, that screen font "AGaramond Plain" needs PostScript font "AGaramond-Regular." Now you can use ResEdit or another resource-editing tool to open the PostScript font file you think is the right one. Open the POST resource whose ID is 501, and search for the string /FontName/AGaramond-Regular def to verify that this is indeed the right PostScript font file.
Sound complicated? Unfortunately, it is. But there's no other guaranteed way to make sure that a certain PostScript font goes with a certain screen font -- well, you could just print your file and watch the imagesetter substitute Courier.
Another font weirdness: If fonts sometimes fail to display correctly on-screen -- even though both the screen font and the printer font are installed -- try bumping up the font cache in ATM (Adobe suggests 50K per font!). If you can't afford that much RAM, use a font-management utility to turn some of your fonts off.
And by the way, you need to use a font-management utility. Symantec's Suitcase and ALSoft's MasterJuggler are currently the only two in town. Both these programs have problems (Suitcase, the more popular one, hasn't been updated since forever), but they're absolutely essential if you have more than a couple of dozen fonts.
Bob Schaffel is emerging-technologies consultant for R. R. Donnelley & Sons. Chuck Weger is a consultant and conference chair for CONCEPPTS 96.
