We have a love-hate relationship with fonts. We love their chiseled serifs, we swoon over their graceful swashes, we kern them to the verge of claustrophobia. We painstakingly track text to perfection, and agonize over minuscule leading values. Wait a minute. This is starting to sound like a romance novel. That would be the love part of the equation. Alas, this chapter is more about the hate part.

Fonts come in several formats: PostScript (often also referred to as Type 1), TrueType, and OpenType. Within those major species, there are subspecies, but it’s sufficient to know the major species. We’ll ignore ancient Mac system fonts, which were just bitmap information.

PostScript (Type 1) Fonts

We were all raised to believe that PostScript fonts were the Only Right Way, convinced that any other font format was evil (pronounced as in old horror movies—eve-yil). In the earlier days of desktop publishing, this was a well-founded belief, because early RIPs couldn’t handle TrueType. (However, that’s no longer the case.)

PostScript fonts consist of two files: A bitmap “screen font” component for onscreen display and a printer component that contains PostScript instructions for actually printing the character. Since it’s made of pixels, the bitmap component alone can’t provide acceptable resolution for output, so if you misplace the printer font, you’re out of luck. Don’t discard the screen font either: It contains additional resources required by the system.

Whereas the screen font was once necessary for onscreen display of a PostScript font, current Macintosh and Windows operating systems can rasterize a printer font for onscreen display once it’s activated without needing a companion screen font to do so. Font activation applications, such as Extensis™ Suitcase or Suitcase Fusion, or FontAgent Pro from Insider Software won’t activate a lone printer font without its companion screen font, but some applications such as Adobe InDesign activate printer fonts placed in their own private fonts folders. Placing a PostScript printer font in InDesign’s fonts folder makes it available to InDesign on both Windows and Macintosh. In either case, the operating system handles the onscreen display without having a screen font. InDesign’s dedicated fonts folder can be found here:

• Windows: Program FilesAdobeAdobe InDesign CS4Fonts
• Macintosh: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS4/Fonts

TrueType Fonts

The TrueType format was the result of a collaboration between Apple Computer and Microsoft and consists of a single file (that is, no separate screen and printer font component). Thus there is no need to keep track of two separate components for screen and print. However, in more primitive times—say, 1993—just mentioning TrueType could strike terror in the heart of a prepress operator. Earlier PostScript RIPs could not interpret TrueType fonts, so it was routine to use a font-conversion utility to change the flavor of the font to PostScript. While such conversions enabled the job to be processed by a RIP, they often resulted in slight translation errors and some compromise of the hinting stored in the TrueType version of the font. Consequently, text appearance was altered, however slightly, from the designer’s expectations. But we were desperate people in those times, and we accepted the slight differences in the interest of actually getting the job to print. Fast-forward to current times. It’s no longer necessary to jump through these treacherous hoops. RIPs can now process TrueType just as easily as PostScript fonts. Really. There is no longer any need to sneer at TrueType fonts as being somehow inferior. Admittedly, if you buy TrueType fonts in a $9.95 font collection called Larry’s Boatload o’Fonts, there’s a chance that they won’t be well behaved. But that isn’t because they’re TrueType fonts. It’s because Larry builds lousy fonts.

OpenType Fonts

OpenType fonts are single-file fonts and do not have separate screen and printer fonts to keep track of. But here’s where the real font fun begins. OpenType fonts are cross platform. This doesn’t mean that Adobe Garamond Pro comes in a Macintosh version and an identical Windows version. Instead, the same font file can be used on a Mac or on a PC with no special handling.

But, as the late night TV ads say: Wait, there’s more. Whereas PostScript fonts are limited to a paltry 256 characters (isn’t that enough?), OpenType fonts can contain more than 65,000 glyphs. A glyph is any distinct letterform, such as a number, a lowercase p, or an ampersand. This allows a font designer to include swashes, contextual ligatures, titling alternates—even fractions—all in one font. The entirety of a font family that previously required separate expert and titling sets can now be contained in one font. See the illustration below for a glimpse of just a few of OpenType’s possibilities.

Adobe Garamond Pro is a lovely font even without invoking its special OpenType features (top). But look what happens when Swashes and Discretionary Ligatures are turned on (bottom).

Not all OpenType fonts contain glyphs in every one of those 65,000 available character positions. For example, one font may have swashes, but another may not. However, the adherence to Unicode mapping ensures that a character exists in the same position from font to font. Unicode is a standard that provides a unique universal identifier for every character, regardless of language, application, or platform. For more information, visit the Unicode Web site. If you set text using some of the special diacritical characters in Caslon Pro, for example, and then change the font used to Garamond Pro, the diacriticals (special language characters, such as á, ä, and ç) are intact because they exist in both fonts.

You can use OpenType fonts without fear of imaging problems. They are compatible with all recent RIPs, and all current font-management software supports OpenType. Not using font-management software? OpenType fonts can be activated by the built-in Font Book application on the Macintosh and by the Windows Fonts control panel. Or you can drop them in the Macintosh system fonts folders to make them available to all applications (although it’s preferable to use font-management software). And having OpenType fonts doesn’t mean you have to stop using the PostScript and TrueType fonts you already have. The benefits of OpenType extend far beyond typographic beauty. One of the motivations for the OpenType format was to provide multilingual support. In the illustration below, you can see the extensive character set in just one font, Myriad Pro from Adobe Systems.

Multilingual support available within the OpenType font Myriad Pro, viewed in the InDesign Glyphs panel.

You won’t be able to use all 65,000 glyphs unless you’re using software that recognizes the additional features. Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop can see and use the entire contents of an OpenType font, whereas QuarkXPress through version 6.5 has blinders on, and it can only utilize the same old 256 characters. QuarkXPress 7.0 introduces support for the complete range of OpenType features.

Adobe has converted its entire font library to OpenType and will no longer be offering PostScript Type 1 fonts. It’s easy to spot OpenType fonts from Adobe: They have Std or Pro as part of their names. Adobe is not the only font vendor marketing OpenType fonts. Most major font vendors now offer OpenType. Given the linguistic support and the enhanced typographic features offered by OpenType fonts, it’s easy to see that it’s the font format of the future. And it’s here today, unlike those flying automobiles we’ve been waiting for.

NOTE: The Std is short for Standard, indicating an Adobe OpenType version of a previously available PostScript Type 1 font. Adobe OpenType fonts with the Pro indicator have more expanded glyph sets and are often the result of combining what once were expert font sets and their base companions.

Glyphs and Characters
It’s easy to confuse the terms character and glyph, but they describe different concepts. A character corresponds to a single position in the Unicode standard, which is a uniform, agreed-upon mapping system for the contents of a font. A glyph, however, is a distinct letterform. Multiple glyphs may exist for a single character position in an OpenType font.

Macintosh OS X System Fonts

Macintosh system fonts such as Geneva, Monaco, Chicago, and Charcoal had traditionally been easy to spot because of their distinctive names. But with the introduction of OS X, Apple threw a monkey wrench into the font wars by including system fonts named Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, and Times Roman, just like their PostScript cousins. Under the hood, these are TrueType fonts, but you’ll see them described as dfonts, a moniker derived from the fact that the fonts are data-only, and not a two-headed file consisting of a data fork and a resource fork. (If this doesn’t mean much to you, don’t worry.)

Macintosh dfonts aren’t inherently evil, but they are problematic because their names are indistinguishable from their PostScript counterparts. If the job is created by multiple people who are using different versions of a font, this may result in font substitution and consequent reflow. Since they’re system fonts, they’re active by default. To use the PostScript fonts of the same names, you have to sneak up on the dfonts to control their activation or deactivation by using dedicated font-management software as described in the earlier section, "PostScript (Type 1) Fonts."

With the advent of the Leopard (10.5) operating system on the Mac, this became more of an issue: Leopard insists on having certain fonts available to it. Try to disable them, and, like zombies in bad B-movies, they keep coming back. If you’re a fan of Helvetica or Helvetica Neue, your PostScript fonts will conflict with the insistent system fonts. Solution? Purchase the OpenType versions of those fonts, and ignore the aggressive versions forced on you by the operating system.

Additionally, dfonts don’t work under OS 9 because they’re not recognized as fonts by the OS 9 operating system or its font-management schemes. If you’re still jumping back to OS 9 to use earlier versions of software such as QuarkXPress 4.x or 5.x, this can complicate your font usage. Imagine that you have used a dfont in a QuarkXPress 6.0 file created in Macintosh OS X, and then saved the page-layout file down for QuarkXPress version 5.0. A user of QuarkXPress 5.0 will open the file under OS 9, and the dfont will not be available. The users will be forced to substitute a similar font, possibly leading to text reflow. One solution is to use the dfontifier utility from Mark Douma to convert dfonts to a font format that is recognized under OS 9. The utility is not supported under Leopard (Mac OS 10.5), however.

OpenType fonts are innocent bystanders in this battle. Their names distinguish them from TrueType, PostScript, and dfont files. As you can see below, the OpenType version of Times is named TimesLTStd, making it much easier to pick it out of the pack.

Sign of the Times. On the left, Macintosh OS X icons for PostScript screen font (left) and printer font (second from left). The OpenType icon is in the center, and Macintosh dfont is on the right. While they look the same at a casual glance, look closer and note the identifiers: FFIL, LWFN, OTF, DFONT.

Windows System Fonts

PC users may now revel in the fact that, starting with Windows 2000, their system fonts are OpenType fonts. In fact, the birth of OpenType is the result of a collaboration between Adobe Systems and Microsoft. The Arial system font has the ability to display an extensive character set, including Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic characters.

Multiple Master Fonts

The term Multiple Master probably elicits as much fear in a prepress department as yelling “TrueType,” and for much the same reason—fear of the unknown. Adobe’s Multiple Master fonts were a great idea: Start with a PostScript font, and then give users the ability to create multiple weights, angles, and widths (such as condensed or extended) of a single font. It was an enlightened idea. The problems arose from a lack of education. It wasn’t obvious how to make all the cool variants, how to collect the variants necessary for your job, or how to ensure that the print service provider knew how to use them. So the Multiple Master concept sort of died on the vine. Its creative promise was never fully realized, and it’s been phased out as an available font product. However, Multiple Master technology is still used for display and printing when fonts are missing in a PDF and for displaying text when fonts are unavailable for an InDesign or Illustrator file.

Substituting One Font Species for Another

A variation on the old joke:

Patient: I didn’t have the necessary PostScript font, so I used my TrueType version. The type reflowed and the line breaks are all wrong now.

Doctor: Don’t do that.

When you collaborate on designs, try to avoid substituting a TrueType version of a font for a PostScript version, or vice versa. Don’t use an OpenType font instead of the file creator’s original font choice, despite your conviction that it’s somehow better. You may get lucky, but you’re still risking type reflow.

This is particularly treacherous if you move a job between platforms. A Windows font and its Macintosh namesake may both be PostScript, but that’s still no guarantee that they were created by the same foundry with the same nuances. The solution to this dilemma, of course, is to use OpenType fonts because of their cross-platform usability. The Creative Suite ships with a generous helping of OpenType fonts to get you started.

Just having a font somewhere on your hard drive isn’t enough. You must activate it to make it available to all the applications on your computer. Both Windows and the Macintosh provide built-in font activation. If you tend to use the same fonts, and don’t need to frequently add fonts, the built-in font activation schemes may be sufficient for your needs.

Apple Font Book

Apple’s free Font Book utility ships as part of OS X. If you’re using a limited selection of fonts for the majority of your work and don’t need the control afforded by creating font sets, Font Book is probably adequate. It may appear to be a font manager, but earlier versions of Font Book did some ugly things. Fonts were moved into the system library, and then deleted from their original location. (There goes your job folder!) And it never deactivated a font that was removed from Font Book’s collections. Fonts remained in the system, eternally activated.

Mercifully, this uncivilized behavior is somewhat improved under OS 10.4 (Tiger). Font Book now copies rather than moves font files. And it actually deactivates fonts when Font Book’s collections are disabled or removed. However, it still leaves a duplicate of the font files in the your Library/Fonts folder.

Windows Control Panel

Windows users can activate fonts by placing them in the Fonts folder of the Control Panel. Much like Apple’s Font Book, the Fonts control panel provides a common system location so that fonts are available to applications. Deleting a font from Windows’ Fonts control panel puts it in the Recycle Bin. There is no provision for creating sets of fonts. Activated fonts are stored together in a single folder, and they’re all awake, all the time.

It’s important to note that the font activation methods provided by your operating system are just that&mdash:font activation, not font management. As an application launches, it takes note of all the activated fonts. Do you really need to have 500 fonts awake all the time? If you have hundreds of fonts active, you’re adding to system overhead and slowing down all your applications. If you’re tired of taking ten minutes to get from A to H in your overly long font listings, it’s a sign that it’s time to adopt some sort of font management.

Font-management programs allow you to selectively activate and deactivate fonts as necessary to reduce system overhead. These programs also allow you to create custom sets of fonts, so you can easily activate all the fonts needed for a job or a particular customer with just one click.

Some of the commonly used font-management applications include Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2 (Mac and Windows), FontAgent Pro from Insider Software (Mac and Windows), Linotype Font Explorer X (Mac only), and Alsoft MasterJuggler (Mac only). Which solution should you choose? There’s no easy answer: It depends on your own tastes. These products provide approximately the same functionality, so your choice will likely depend on your fondness for a particular interface. Download a trial version of the software, give it a spin, and see if it fits with your workflow and requirements.

Automatic Font Activation

In addition to allowing you to create and activate font sets, some font-management solutions install plug-ins or XTensions that provide the ability to automatically activate fonts as needed when document files are launched. Occasionally, an auto-activation plug-in can conflict with other plug-ins in some applications. Symptoms may include minor effects such as display glitches or pauses while fonts are activated. Such glitches are rarely dangerous, but be prepared for them.

Font Conflicts

It is possible to have multiple font files with the same name: For example, over the years you may have bought a PostScript Type 1 version of Helvetica and a TrueType version, and then found that those legacy fonts now conflict with the Macintosh system font also named Helvetica. How do you know which font is the “right” font?

That’s how your font-management software feels when it encounters PostScript, TrueType, and Macintosh system fonts—all with the same name. If one flavor is active, and you attempt to activate another, things get exciting, as shown below.

Attempting to activate a PostScript version of Helvetica prompts an alert because the OS already has its own version of Helvetica. Fortunately, font-management software (Extensis Suitcase shown here) allows you to sneak around and fix this.

As mentioned earlier, this can happen when the desired font has the same name as an operating system font; take advantage of your font management applications’s ability to manage system fonts to resolve the conflict, if possible. It also pays to perform some font housecleaning. Use a utility such as Morrison SoftDesign’s FontDoctor (available for both Mac and Windows) to check for damaged and duplicate fonts. FontDoctor also organizes fonts into a sensible library to make your font life easier. You might consider discarding TrueType versions of fonts in favor of the PostScript duplicates.

And, once again, OpenType can come to the rescue. The unique names of OpenType fonts preclude such conflicts. It may seem that I’m shilling for OpenType, but the format truly is the solution to so many issues, and it offers so many other advantages. It’s like a wonder drug with no bad side effects!

You probably don’t think of fonts as software, but that’s how fonts are distributed and licensed. They’re not just little drawings of letters. Fonts also contain instructions for font appearance and imaging. Consider the prodigious amount of work that goes into creating a font, and perhaps you’ll understand why you shouldn’t just freely distribute fonts. Each character must be painstakingly drawn. The designer must take into consideration how characters fit together, how they will look at various sizes, create hinting information, and much more. Professional font-creation software is expensive and complex because designing fonts is not a simple undertaking. Consider that a copy of the FontLab font editing application costs $650—that should give you an idea of the nontrivial nature of font creation and font editing!

End User License Agreements (EULAs)

Yes, you’ll find EULAs with fonts that you purchase (you did purchase them, didn’t you?), although there’s a good chance you’ve never read them. Most font foundries allow use of a purchased font on several workstations and one or two printing devices, so if you’ve bought a font for a three-person workgroup that shares one networked printer, you’re probably abiding by the EULA (commonly pronounced yoo-la). (Advances in font EULAs were covered recently on Graphics.com.)

But the licensing situation is more complex than you may have realized. When you send your job to a print service provider, you gather up all the necessary files, including fonts. Surprise—you’re probably in violation of the EULA for doing so. Here’s an excerpt from a major font foundry’s EULA:

You may send a copy of any font along with your documents to a commercial printer or other service bureau to enable the editing or printing of your document, provided that such party has informed you that it owns a valid license to use that particular font software. [Italics added]

In other words, to be in compliance with the EULA, both you and the print service provider must have purchased licenses for the font. You may have never read the fine print, but this is indeed the letter of the law when it comes to font licensing. In other words, your inclusion of the font in a collection of job files submitted to the printer is not legal if the printer doesn’t also own the font. And what are the chances that your printer owns every font on Earth?

Embedding Fonts in PDFs

You may think that no font vendor would object to an end user embedding a licensed font in a PDF. Well, some do. (The surprises just keep coming, don’t they?) While we’re not aware of any method for extracting a font from a PDF, apparently some font vendors fear that it is (or may become) possible. To forestall such thievery, some have included clauses in their EULAs that prescribe that fonts must be subset, which is a good idea, font licensing issues aside. Subsetting embeds only the characters needed to image the PDF file rather than the entire font. (Illustrator and InDesign automatically subset any embedded fonts.) They further stipulate that only one copy of the PDF must be supplied to the recipient. But beyond these two fairly harmless requirements, there’s a rather sinister stipulation: They insist that the PDF must contain security settings to allow only viewing and printing.

These strictures don’t sound unreasonable until you consider an important aspect of securing PDFs. To make security settings stick in a PDF, you must use at least a permissions password to protect the security settings. Otherwise, the recipient could just remove the security limitations. However, to place a secured PDF into a page, or to use it in an imposition process, the recipient will have to know the password to allow the file to be used. This defeats the purpose of imposing security, and seems to put both the creator of the PDF and the print service provider in the position of violating the EULA. So, once again, the legally acceptable solution is for the print service provider to purchase a license for the font. Note that some font vendors sell what is called a service bureau license at a reduced price, which is considered an extension of your license and may be exercised by the print service provider only for output of your jobs. Yes, it’s a complex subject. But the proprieties of font licensing are widely overlooked.

Several EULAs suggest submitting PostScript files to the print service provider. While this would certainly force a designer to painstakingly check files before setting them in digital concrete, it’s a fairly draconian approach, and offers no provision for corrections.

The sanest legal approach is to truly read the EULAs for fonts you own, and take the measures necessary to be in compliance with their stipulations, even if it means purchasing additional licenses for your print service provider. It’s a small addition to job cost in the interest of unquestionable legality. Going forward, it would be wise to pore over the EULA for any fonts you’re thinking of buying, keeping these issues in mind.

There are also some fonts that contain a "don’t embed" flag which prevents these fonts from being embedded in a PDF. Such fonts are rare, and you will be warned that you have used a non-embeddable font if you attempt to create a PDF in InDesign or Illustrator. If the EULA for the font does not allow converting text to outlines, you will have to substitute a font that does allow embedding.

Converting Text To Outlines

By now you’re probably thinking, “Surely I can just convert my text to outlines and completely avoid the Font Police.” Surprisingly (or perhaps not, at this point), converting text to outlines does not sidestep the provisions of the font vendor’s EULA. In fact, while some font vendors’ licensing allows conversion of text to outlines, many expressly forbid it.

Additionally, you must consider that, even if a font vendor’s EULA permits outlining fonts, you may see some slight loss of quality when printing to low-resolution devices such as in-house printers if you convert to outlines, especially with small, serif text.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? First and foremost, read the license before you purchase fonts. If you’re purchasing fonts online, the vendor should make the EULA available to you before you commit to purchasing a font. You’ll find that some font foundries are less restrictive than others on issues such as font embedding and outlining. Either patronize those with less stringent EULAs, purchase fonts for your print service provider…or learn how to create your own fonts. That will give you some sympathy for font designers! And don’t name your firstborn child Eula, or she won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything.

Sending Fonts to the Print Service Provider

If you have studied the fine print in the licensing agreements for all the fonts you’re using in a project, and you’ve determined that you and your print service provider are in full compliance with any applicable licenses, remember to gather up all the necessary fonts when you submit your files for printing. If you submit PDF files, make sure you’ve correctly embedded the fonts.