My thoughts on fonts...

[Vee]

If I had my way, there would be 3 Fonts.

Helvetica
Times
and.... well make that 2. 2 fonts styles, and only one founder.
No more conflucks.. I mean conflicts.
Allz good in prepress now!

 

[gnubler]

I do understand. Thank goodness for Indy's ability to outline fonts. In fact, I used it just today on a font CHOSEN BY ME on a project. Everything was more simple back in the day.

I was once told a story by someone whose father owned a printshop in the 50s/60s. He would go to meet clients to discuss a printing project, and after successful meetings would stop at the nearest payphone to call the paper vendor to place an order. In his pocket he kept three small scraps of paper - all the types of paper available to printers at that time. He felt each piece to decide which would be best for the job - color choice involved white, white, and white - and that was that. Now we deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of stock colors, weights, textures, etc...all assembled in fancy little swatchbooks.

[frailer]

Thank goodness for Indy's ability to outline fonts

It's great, isn't it? Got proofs back from a customer asking for 2 words to be italicised in a sub-head. Instruction was "+10 degree lean in Indy". All nice vector info and won't act-up in your RIP. Kinda funny instruction, though. Am assuming this is a no-go in Quack.

[jezza]

You can put a skew on text in Quark it would apply the whole paragraph, you can do it to individual words and place them into paragraph later, but out lining type in QX is a bit of a pain to say the least...

[mwc]

If I had my way, there would be 3 Fonts.

Helvetica
Times
and.... well make that 2. 2 fonts styles, and only one founder.
No more conflucks.. I mean conflicts.
Allz good in prepress now!

 

Helvetica and Times can be flakey sometimes as well, different version from the same foundry as well.
I mandated that we only use Courier in our shop...and all has been blissful.
AND my followup directive was reduce all the multi-color presse to one-unit , black ink, no screens....just type and line art.
(I think I'm looking for a job soon, though..)

[hotmetal]

Wonder how many people know that back in the late 1980s Adobe released their library on floppy disks - and several of the disks were shipped with corrupt fonts.

There were, I think, 7 corrupt faces altogether. Helvetica condensed light italic, Franklin Gothic something or another, Antique Olive, gee, somewheres in my files at home I have a complete list. We used to call them the Seven Deadly Fonts.

If you were the legal owner of one of these corrupt disks, you could get a free replacement. Too late for the industry, though. By the time Adobe admited their mistake, the fonts had been pirated and spread far and wide. Even now there will be a job from hell that when I look at the fonts the client included, there will be something from 1988 lurking in there... bingo. Back around 1991 there was a macintosh "consultant" here in town who would come and "set you up" which meant, among other things, he'd give you a hot copy of the early ATM along with this huge pile of Adobe faces he carried around on a 44MB Syquest disk. Well, guess what? Those fonts were, of course, hotter than a two dollar pistol. And, wonder of wonders, the 7 deadly fonts were on that Syquest.

I called this guy the Typhoid Mary of Type. His ever-so-helpful "consulting" business probably cost the printers in this town (and still does) hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and materials.

But, personally, I love fonts. Helps if you have a good understanding of how they work. And realize that everything changed in 1991...

But that's another story...

[frailer]

Hang about, hotmetal. You go back a ways with fonts. You're starting to look like a "resource".  And BTW, you could serialise episodes in here. I only started in this weird digital prepress game in '04. I'm all ears...no, really!

[hotmetal]

Hang about, hotmetal. You go back a ways with fonts. You're starting to look like a "resource".  And BTW, you could serialise episodes in here. I only started in this weird digital prepress game in '04. I'm all ears...no, really!

I started setting type on computers (a Varityper) - in 1978. Around 1985 the boss of the NYC typeshop where I was working set a Mac Plus down in front of us and I was the only one interested in learning about it. And blah blah blah. Can I have that beer now?

[gtrev]

Thank goodness for Indy's ability to outline fonts

Am assuming this is a no-go in Quack.

Text to box In Quark does do it - Kinda - have to watch out for fonts with elaborate serif's - I't's gotten me out of a hole a couple of times.

Outline Text in Pitstop has been a godsend in applying trapping to some jobs!