FontLab Group, Tips and Tricks : Font Family Naming in FontLab.

Adam,

Thanks for your reply, You say :

2. Never use any of the “OT” names (i.e. OT Family Name and OT Style Name).

but in your plan here.

http://groups.msn.com/fontlab/tipsandtricks.msnw?action=get_message&mvie...

Put Long Family in the OT "Family Name" field (on the OpenType-specific names pane).

c.

Another piece to the puzzle solved by Adam :-)

Thanks!

ChrisL

For an example, you can look at page 5 of this. Replace "Semibold" by "Medium" and it should resemble your family.

If you will generate OpenType fonts only (which I get from your very first post), you do not need to fill in the "Menu Name" and "FOND Name".

If you make PS-OpenType fonts, you can use "Coop-Regular" in "PS Font Name".
If you make TT-OpenType fonts too, you should use "Coop" (and "CoopLight" for the other sub-family) in "PS Font Name". (This name will not be displayed but is used for identifying the font.)

Since it seems that you want the family to appear as identical as possible in all applications: Leave "OT Family Name", "OT Style Name" and "Compatible Menu Name" empty.

Very important: In FLS5 Options/Preferences, section "Generating OpenType PS (.otf)", you must activate "Use PostScript FontName as FullName on Windows" if you are generating PS-OpenType fonts.

And then: Double-check if all of Adam's requirements for absolute platform-compatibility are met!

And do many tests.

Karsten

This rather sounds like your font cache is corrupt.
Try this (in this order):

(1) Quit all applications.
(2) Search for "AdobeFnt", then delete all files looking like "AdobeFnt10.lst" (if you have CS2), the number may differ. These are Adobe-app font caches.
But do NOT delete files ending with".db".
(3) Use Font Finagler or a similar tool to delete the Mac OSX system font caches. This requires a restart of the system.

Does this work?

(You can contact me offline through my Typophile user page.)

Karsten

VARIANT 1
PS Font Name* | Family Name | Style Name | OT Family Name** | OT Style Name** | Is Bold | Is Italic |
Coop-Lig | Coop Lig | Regular | Coop | Light | N | N |
Coop-LigIta | Coop Lig | Italic | Coop | Light Italic | N | Y |
Coop-Reg | Coop | Regular | Coop | Regular | N | N |
Coop-Ita | Coop | Italic | Coop | Italic | N | Y |
Coop-Med | Coop Med | Regular | Coop | Medium | N | N |
Coop-MedIta | Coop Med | Italic | Coop | Medium Italic | N | Y |
Coop-Bol | Coop | Bold | Coop | Bold | Y | N |
Coop-BolIta | Coop | Bold Italic | Coop | Bold Italic | Y | Y |

VARIANT 2
PS Font Name* | Family Name | Style Name | OT Family Name** | OT Style Name** | Is Bold | Is Italic |
Coop-Lig | Coop Lig | Regular | Coop | Light | N | N |
Coop-LigIta | Coop Lig | Italic | Coop | Light Italic | N | Y |
Coop-Reg | Coop | Regular | Coop | Regular | N | N |
Coop-Ita | Coop | Italic | Coop | Italic | N | Y |
Coop-Med | Coop Lig | Bold | Coop | Medium | Y | N |
Coop-MedIta | Coop Lig | Bold Italic | Coop | Medium Italic | Y | Y |
Coop-Bol | Coop | Bold | Coop | Bold | Y | N |
Coop-BolIta | Coop | Bold Italic | Coop | Bold Italic | Y | Y |

The two variants differ in how Coop-Med and Coop-MedIta are style-linked. In the first variant, they create a style-linked group of their own, in variant 2 they are linked as bold counterparts to the Light styles.

*) To simplify things, Full Name to be same as PS Font Name.

I also recommend that the style elements in PS Font Name are always abbreviated to three letters (i.e. "Lig" for Light, "Med" for Medium, "Bol" for Bold etc.) In the Family Name field, you may use those abbreviations or full names, i.e. either "Coop Lig"/"Coop Med" or "Coop Light"/"Coop Medium" or even "Coop Lt"/"Coop Md". Sometimes it's wiser to use the shorter names because this leaves you room for a bunch of other suffixes that indicate the character set and your foundry, e.g. "Coop Lig FL Pro" etc.

**) You can either fill these fields in, then you'll get "prettier" Adobe-style font menus in Adobe and Apple applications, but no 100% cross-platform compatibility, or you can omit these fields entirely, then you'll get Bitstream-style "grouped into four styles per style-linked group" font menus and 100% cross-platform compatibility.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
Fontlab Ltd.

Twardoch,

Thanks for this great explanation. Final question I think - What should I be doing with the Non-English or special font names: [name] table. Do I just click on the import and leave the information or alter it or leave it blank.

c.

but in the font list I get two font names Coop and Coop Light within each of these are the same styles Light, Regular, Bold and Bold Italic.

Yes, this is correct, and this matches Adam's Variant 2, whereas Variant 1 would give you three family names in the font list: "Coop", "Coop Lig", "Coop Med" -- this means, if you omit OT Family Name and OT Style Name.
If you do provide OT Family Name and OT Style Name, you will see only one family ("Coop") in Adobe applications but two/three families e.g. in Word. (To this however applies what Adam said in the same post in footnote ** about "prettier Adobe-style font menus".)

You can leave the Non-English/special font name table empty, but in the options/preferences, section "Generating OpenType PS, OpenType TT and TrueType", select "Do not export OpenType name records".

Nice that after the many "ifs" it comes down to a specific solution!
But the "ifs" are important since every little difference will make a difference later: e.g. choosing Adam's variants 1 or 2, or providing OT names or not, already results in 4 different appearances of the font family in different applications ...

Oh my god, it works

Thank you all so much for your help and input.

Not too such how and why it does, but I can work that out backwards.

c.

> Why does the FontLab user have to enter full separate
> information for these two variants?
> Why can’t I just enter one set of information, and
> then just click a button for either Variant 1 or Variant 2?

I don't understand the question. Those two variants are the designer's discretion, and are just examples. There are many other variants possible, and it's the designer who must make a choice how he *wants* his font menus to be structured. There are numerous limitations given by the spec, but there still is a lot of what the designer has to decide.

>> Very important: In FLS5 Options/Preferences, section
>> “Generating OpenType PS (.otf)”, you must activate “Use
>> PostScript FontName as FullName on Windows” if you are
>> generating PS-OpenType fonts.
> What’s the actual effect of activating/deactivating this option?

This option should be always on. I think we will remove it from future releases.

> What should I be doing with the Non-English or special
> font names: [name] table

Leave it blank.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
Fontlab Ltd.

Richard you should start a new thread for this. --The first thing I would check is that your "space" character has something other than a zero width.

Please advise.
I am new to this forum. (thanks again William).
How do I create a new thread with ? about fontographer?

thanks
R

>How do I create a new thread with ? about fontographer?

Click on the 'build' forum. Scroll to the bottom. You will see the button for creating a thread.

thanks

I agree, font family naming is just one of these topics, where FontLab Studio could give the user some more help. I can understand if such things as a live menu preview are hardly possible, but what about a "naming assistant", "export assistant" and so on.

FontLab has a very good usability when it comes to the design of the font, but to master these hundrets of checkboxes you almost have to be a software engineer …
I especially love this one checkbox »Use this one only if you know what you are doing«. ;-)

Ralf

trying to make sure that our tools are compatible with what Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Quark etc. are doing.

I think you should take a more proactive role.
Those guys will always be doing things different ways.
However, Fontlab is more dominant in its field than any of them are in theirs, so is ideally placed to establish some sensible family naming formats, and have the behemoths conform.
That would be particular useful in weaning Microsoft from its "a family is four" prejudice, which is both ante-deluvian and anti-typographic.

I'll repeat: such family naming standards would be primarily for retail fonts, and hence of great benefit to the end-user massive. For more specialized concerns, e.g. custom fonts for proprietary system users, there's always the "lower" level of manual inputting for those who know what they're doing.

Thanks for your consideration, Adam.

***

Karsten:
Nice work on Font Naming, very useful, and such exquisite typography! (Except for the annoying Th ligs... :-)

(Just a post to keep this thread in my "Track")

.

It's related. You need to follow the recommendations I posted in order for your style-linking to work properly.

Adam

I'm glad Microsoft has made naming so complicated with their quaint nuclear family conception of typography. (So very bourgeois, pronounced "Bur-joyce", of course).

It gives me the opportunity to charge my clients big bucks for making the large-family, cross-plaform font solutions they require.~

I could do without the hair-tearing though (metaphoric term, hair already dispensed with).

Yesterday I was making an OpenType font family of two, Regular and Light. How gay.
But the damn thing wouldn't even work in InDesign on OS X -- it kept giving me two separate menu entries. Somewhere in the labyrinth of code is Wintel stuff that has infected my Mac and its apps, some "logic" saying "what, no bold? -- therefore the lightest weight must be regular, as well as the regular regular," or some such thing.

The only way I could get it to work as a single menu entry was was by naming the light weight "Fine" and giving it a manual numerical value of 250, and giving the Regular a manual value of 600. That produces two entries on PCs, but you get Light as a separate "family" there anyway.

Thanks, Thomas and Typophile! -- an earlier thread here helped me sort that out.