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Tuesday, April 05, 2005

The Almost Perfect Font

What to do when the client loves your font choice, but asks could you just change one character?

Naming Rights

It’s very important that you rename your new font to avoid confusion; this also allows you to install both the original and the modified font at the same time. In the File>Font Info dialog, fill in the Family Name, Weight and Width fields. The Font Name is used by a Postscript print driver so do not include spaces in this name. The Menu Name should match the Family Name. The FOND name is used by the Mac OS to organize fonts into families. (Open a few different fonts and check their Font Info dialogs to get a feel for naming conventions.)

You can assign any name to your modified font, and if you want it to sort under a special name (such as “ProjectName") then go ahead and enter a unique Family Name. However, if you retain the original Family Name, your font variant should sort under the same group in an application’s Font menu. (According to Fontlab, Windows users may need to put variants into a separate family, as the OS recognizes only the variants bold, italics, and bold italics.)

If you are editing an existing font for personal use, retain the information in the Copyright and Designer panels to avoid copyright infringement.

Talking ‘bout Your Font Generation

Save the TypeTool project, and keep this file in case you need to regenerate the font using different output options. Last but not least, generate your new font: If saving the font on Windows, choose File > Generate Font and save as TrueType or Postscript Type 1; on Mac, choose File > Generate Mac Suitcase and select the format from the popup.

While TypeTool can convert between Postscript Type 1 and TrueType type formats, they are encoded differently, so we suggest you save a modified font in the same format as the source unless you have a good reason not to (such as when a plug-in reads only TrueType fonts). In general, Postscript Type 1 is a more accurate format, so converting from TrueType to Type 1 should be okay. Going from Type 1 to TrueType may result in a slight rounding off of characters.

Install the new font as you would any other font. Be sure to install both the old and new fonts so you can check that the fonts don’t clash and that they are grouped as expected in the font menu. If not, edit the names in the Font Info dialog and regenerate.

Check the TypeTool manual to better understand the various editing tools, font metrices, font naming, and other subjects we’ve touched on here; there are also Flash tutorials online. But we hope this overview will give you the confidence to font wrangle a few characters when you find the “almost perfect” title font for an important project.

Postscript: Font Resources

Can’t get enough of fonts? We maintain a page on our web site with links to our favorite fonts and font resources.

Motion Graphics • Production •

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