Fonts come in all shapes and sizes. Add a pinch of Serif or sans serif, a dollop of roman, bold, italic, and then stir in a little condensed. You can assemble any combination of these like bold italic, condensed light roman…to get your perfect recipe. It’s wonderful, yes, but as you scan the list of ingredients and delve deeper into the pot, you quickly learn how complex, and unpredictable, fonts truly can be.
1. The first cut.
Imagine. You navigate the myriad of typefaces and find that perfect font, the one you absolutely can’t live without. It’s tall, trim, with just enough edge, but not too showy to take away from the message. But, hold on! Don’t get too attached to that pretty face just yet. Unfortunately, all fonts are not created equal.
2. Read the label.
You see, font designers, including those at Adobe, and Bitstream, personalize fonts. It’s like a signature. The serif turns up, it turns down, maybe it disappears altogether when it becomes italic. Or perhaps it is a bit fatter, squattier, or even thinner. Don’t assume your Century Roman is the same as client X, or client Y, or even mine. They may be subtle changes, but different nonetheless. Make sure we all have the same font, from the same foundry, so we see the same thing.
3. Salt or Pepper? Mac or a PC?
OK, so you chose the perfect typeface, you have the same creator, but wait, are you a Mac or a PC? That’s right, many fonts are platform specific-Postscript and TrueType on the PC, Postscript or T1 on the Mac. And they don’t like to talk very much. But you need a little of both, perhaps? Well, thanks to the recent collaboration between Adobe and Microsoft, thousands of fonts now work on both systems. This new cross-platform font file format, called OpenType®, makes translation back and forth between systems easy.
But, beware. Not all fonts are available in OpenType yet. The good news is that there are some great converters available, including one I particularly like called FontXChange® from FontGear.
Fonts. They’re enough to send any designer into a tizzy, never mind the average PC user! Happy Fonting!
