Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Using and Managing Fonts Technology Tour July 2004
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Contents Page 3 Introduction What’s New in Panther: The Highlights Page 5 New Font Features in Panther Font Book Font Panel Character Palette Page 9 Font Management Mac OS X Font Locations Classic Fonts and Applications Server-Based Fonts Managing Fonts with Font Book Organizing Fonts for a Third-Party Font Manager Page 21 Optimizing a Production System Removing or Deactivating Nonessential Fonts Font Management for Prepress and Production Page 27
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 3 Introduction Whether you’re producing sophisticated type effects for print layouts or selecting an easy-on-the-eyes font for online readers, you know how crucial typography is for successful visual communications. Recognizing this fact, Apple has made typography a top priority in every Macintosh operating system from the very beginning.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 4 Smoother fonts. Thanks to its underlying Quartz technology, Mac OS X makes text beautiful and easy to read on all displays. A setting in the Appearance system preference lets you select one of four font-smoothing styles to increase onscreen readability: Standard (best for CRT displays), Light, Medium (best for flat-panel displays), and Strong.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 5 New Font Features in Panther Panther offers a number of exciting new font technologies and applications. Font Book, the Font panel, and the Character Palette make it easy to access and manipulate fonts in your Mac OS X applications. You can use them to work with your fonts in a consistent manner from program to program.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 6 Font Panel The new Font panel in Panther lets you access fonts from a number of Mac OS X applications—including Mail, TextEdit, and Keynote. You can use the Font panel to preview fonts, create font collections for specific clients or jobs, and add fonts to a favorites menu. Any action you take in the Font panel is reflected in Font Book to ensure consistency and save time.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Typography panel The Typography panel allows you to tailor fonts so they are exactly right for the project at hand. Controllable features include ligatures, style variations, kerning, number spacing, fraction rendering, swashes, number and letter case, and more. You access the Typography panel from the Action menu in the lower-left corner of the Font panel. This panel changes depending on the font you’ve selected in the Font panel.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 8 Character Palette The Character Palette makes it easy to locate a specific character or symbol on your system, preview it, and select among its different variations—across all the active fonts on your system. In addition to providing a view of characters by font (similar to the preview capability in Font Book), the Character Palette lets you view individual characters grouped in various categories.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Font Management Mac OS X Panther lets you organize and access fonts with unprecedented control and ease. Whether you want to store fonts on a central server, activate and deactivate groups of fonts with a click of the mouse, or organize fonts for a third-party font manager, Mac OS X has the tools you need—already built in.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 10 Mac OS X Font Locations Mac OS X is a versatile, multiuser operating system—a major benefit in creative environments. To maximize creative options and workflow productivity, you can set up one system exactly how you like it, and configure the same system to suit the preferences of other users such as freelance designers.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 11 Classic Fonts and Applications If you work with Classic applications, you’ll find that Mac OS X offers a number of features that improve on the font management capabilities that were available to you in Mac OS 9. Because you are essentially running two different operating systems side by side—Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X—there are a few font issues you should know about.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 12 Sharing fonts on the network If you have a system running Mac OS X Server version 10.3, you can—with the proper licenses—set up fonts to be shared easily across multiple computers. Follow these steps: 1 Install the fonts in a folder called Library/Fonts on the system running Mac OS X Server. 2 Open Workgroup Manager and click Sharing. 3 Click Share Points and select the folder that contains the fonts. 4 Click Network Mount.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 13 Font Book lets you create any number of collections, making it easier than ever to organize your fonts and activate specific sets when you need them. Individual font families can be placed in multiple collections. If you manage fonts from many different sources that contain duplicate fonts of the same name, you will need to use Font Book in a very specific manner.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 14 When installing fonts in Font Book, the best method is to start with your original font sources—typically CDs or DVDs—and add the fonts to Font Book using the All Fonts menu. If you have graphics applications that you still use in Classic, it’s best to add all of your fonts to the Classic location.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Dragging and dropping Adding fonts from the Finder is an easy way to install a new collection. You can drag a folder containing fonts into the Collection list in Font Book. When you drag one folder to the list, the new collection maintains the name of the top-level directory. Fonts installed in this manner are always installed in the User fonts folder.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 16 Searching for fonts In addition to previewing fonts, Panther makes it easy to quickly find the fonts you need, even if you use dozens of fonts. You can search for fonts by their family name, such as Helvetica or Times, or by the typeface name, such as Bold, Condensed, or Italic. The latter can be very useful for finding the right style of font even if you don’t know the name.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 17 Creating System and Master Font Book collections As a design or print professional, you probably need to add, delete, activate, and deactivate fonts frequently for different clients or projects. Sometimes you might also want to deactivate some of your installed fonts and use other font formats from previous projects or for print specifications.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 18 Creating a Master Fonts set Now that you’ve created a System Font Book collection to protect certain fonts from deactivation, you can gather all of your favorite fonts into “Master Fonts,” your base font collection. The Master Fonts collection gives you easy access to your fonts. It can also play an important role when you need to add fonts for a certain job or check that all the fonts you need for the job are available.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 19 Font Book and Classic applications Font Book is designed to manage fonts for Mac OS X applications, so activating and deactivating fonts in Font Book does not affect the fonts you use in Classic applications. Any font in the Fonts folder of your Classic System Folder will always show up in the font lists of your Classic applications, even if you have disabled it in Font Book.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 20 If you have both Classic and Mac OS X versions of a font and you choose the Classic font (the one stored in /System Folder/Fonts) as the one to keep, that font will continue to work in both Mac OS X and Classic. If you select a version outside of the Mac OS 9 System Folder (such as /Library/Fonts), that font will no longer be available to Classic applications.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 21 Optimizing a Production System Production tip If you are a system administrator, you will want to retrieve and maintain a “clean” set of fonts from original CDs. Or you can use products such as FontDoctor or TranType to create a clean set of fonts for consistent, predictable deployment to users. Depending on your workflow requirements, you might find it helpful to optimize font organization on your Macintosh workstations.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 22 1 Open Font Book. 2 Click the triangle next to All Fonts. 3 Select Classic Mac OS. This option shows the Fonts folder in your Classic System Folder. 4 Select the fonts you wish to remove. To select multiple fonts that are contiguous in the list, use Shift-click. To select noncontiguous fonts, use Command-click. 5 Now choose either Remove Font from the File menu or Disable Font from the Edit menu.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Removing or deactivating fonts in Mac OS X Font Book makes it easy to remove fonts from the Mac OS X system, regardless of where the fonts reside. 1 Open Font Book. 2 Click the triangle next to All Fonts. 3 Select Computer. This option shows the fonts from two physical locations on your hard drive: /System/Library/Fonts (requires administrator access) and /Library/Fonts.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 24 Keeping a version of Helvetica A few Mac OS X applications require an active version of Helvetica. The most common symptom when Helvetica is missing is that the application does not display windows or type does not display correctly. Corrupt fonts can also cause incorrect type display. (See Appendix A, “Additional Resources,” for more information on this topic.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 25 Font Management for Prepress and Production Font Book does not create a direct link from a specific font to the collection it came from; therefore, service bureaus and other users who need to manage many duplicates and keep them linked to a set or a collection might want to use Font Book in a special manner.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 26 Managing multiple versions of a font If you have documents that use PostScript versions of a font with the same name, such as Helvetica, rather than the dfont version that comes with Mac OS X, you will want to make sure that you use the same font for output that was used during the original design of the document. Otherwise, the type might flow differently or glyphs might be substituted.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 27 Appendix A: Additional Resources Many commercial, shareware, and freeware font utilities are available. They fall into the following general categories: • Waterfall-style viewers display “quick brown fox” or other font samples, sometimes for multiple fonts simultaneously. • Spec sheet utilities print a list of fonts along with sample output from each selected font.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X The following are a few examples: FontAgent Pro. Insider Software’s FontAgent Pro helps you maintain font integrity, create custom font sets, and activate them when they are needed. Font Cache Cleaner and Font Cache Expunger. You can use one of several utilities to automate the process of deleting font caches, including Font Cache Cleaner (www.versiontracker.com) and Font Cache Expunger (www.elara.com).
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X Appendix B: Mac OS X Fonts 29
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Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 31 Appendix C: Font Support in Mac OS X Mac OS X supports tens of thousands of fonts in many different formats. These formats are listed below. Mac PostScript Type 1 Adobe PostScript fonts launched desktop publishing and are used today by publishers, corporations, and government agencies for high-quality output to laser printers, imagesetters, and platesetters. Each PostScript font requires two files.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 32 Appendix D: Font Locations in Mac OS X Mac OS X provides multiple locations for fonts for several reasons: • Some applications, including Adobe applications such as InDesign, have their own font folders. • On a computer shared by several users, one user’s fonts might not be the same as another’s, so Mac OS X provides private Fonts folders for individual users. • Mac OS X is designed to be a multiuser system.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 33 Here is a list of the places you can install fonts in Mac OS X v10.3. Any fonts that you put into subfolders of these folders are also activated. Application’s own font folder (if it has one) Some applications create their own font folder either in the application’s folder or in the shared Application Support folder. Note that these applications have their own methods for choosing between conflicting fonts.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 34 Appendix E: International Language Support Using the Input menu with international fonts To make it easy to select keyboard layouts that correspond to different fonts, Mac OS X provides the Input menu. This menu (located in the International pane in System Preferences) shows different keyboard layouts so that you can use the same keyboard to select different glyphs.
Technology Tour Advanced Typography with Mac OS X 35 positions. This means that, in a Unicode font, familiar dingbat characters might not be accessible via the keyboard letter “n.” Access to these characters depends on whether the application manufacturer accommodates the older input method. When you encounter a Unicode font, use the Character Palette in Mac OS X to select special characters.
