User Guide

Futura family has a single entry in the font menu, and to the
right of the name is an arrow indicating that there are
multiple fonts under that listing. If you press on the “Futura”
font listing you will see a menu of four styles off to the
right: Light, Light Oblique, Book, Book Oblique, Bold, Bold
Oblique.
It is easy to create font families that behave like this. All
you need is Style Merger, ResEdit, and a couple of
minutes. Be aware, however, that if you create ATR-style
families, everyone who uses that font without Adobe Type
Reunion will have the penalty of seeing four entries in their
font menu (one for each style).
The first step in creating ATR-compatible font families is
to make sure you have named each font properly. Type the
name you want to see in the font menu in the Family Name
field of the Font Information dialog. In the Style Name field
specify the name you want to appear for that particular
style, prefixed with a hyphen.
In the next example, we create a font family
called “PetesFont,” which consists of four styles. For all
four fonts, enter “PetesFont” in the Family Name field.
Then for the plain font, leave the Style Name field blank.
For the other fonts, enter “-Bold,” “-Italic,” and “-BoldItalic”
in the Style Name field for the bold, italic, and bolditalic
fonts, respectively. Of course, you don’t have to use these
names; Wacko, Slanto, and ClapDappo would work just as
well—maybe better!
The thing that’s complicated about doing this stuff is linking
together the subfamilies. For example, suppose you were
using PetesFont-Italic in an application, and you changed to
the bold style. The selected font should automatically
change to PetesFont-BoldItalic, not merely make a fake
bold of the italic face. In addition, if you were using
PetesFont-Bold, and you selected the italic style, that should
also switch to PetesFont-BoldItalic since it was already
Fontographer User's Manual
8: Creating a Font Family Page #7