User Guide

Chapter Eight
Creating a font Family
Families: Windows, SUN, NEXTSTEP
Font Families on the Macintosh
How Style Merger Works
Do you look like your brother... or sister? Do you both have
brown eyes, or red hair? Or does one of you look like your
mother and the other like your father? How about your
parents; do they resemble your grandparents? Well, just as
your own family has differences and similarities... so do
your fonts.
A family of fonts is defined as all the styles of one
typeface. The group shares a common design but can differ
in attributes such as character width, weight, and posture (i.
e., Roman vs. Italic). A typical computer [font] family unit
frequently contains four fonts—Plain, Italic, Bold, and
BoldItalic—in all point sizes.
To understand and appreciate the advantage of font families,
imagine having twenty typefaces with four styles each
installed in your system. How would that look in your font
menu? It would look like 80 fonts, since every typeface
would appear four times, representing each of its styles. It
would also be inconvenient to drag your mouse up the font
menu and search through the 80 entries every time you
wanted to make your existing font bold. Using font families
improves this scenario in two ways: it lets you use the
command keys on the keyboard to change the style of the
font, and it shortens your font menu by three-fourths since
there is just one listing for each family rather than one for
each font. It is easy to appreciate the “urge to merge” your
fonts.
In order to build families, you must use appropriately named
fonts. In other words, their names must have the same base
Fontographer User's Manual
8: Creating a Font Family Page #1