Fonts they are a-changing

[Rene Stephenson]

Thanks, Steve, for all that insight! I can use this information to help  narrow my search, and also to demonstrate the importance of identifying  and specifying exact fonts within the family.
  
  Coincidentally, I'm updating the company Style Guide for tech doc right  now, too, so whenever we pin this down, I can spec it in the Style  Guide, even if they don't narrow down the specs in the branding  guideline.
  
  Rene

Steve Rickaby <srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk> wrote:  At 17:09 -0800 21/2/07, Dov Isaacs wrote:

>Unless  you standardize on a particular version of any font and enforce use of  that version, you are being setup for disasters including missing text,  wrong text, relayout, etc., especially when everything is supposed to  come together for PDF file production, printing, or both.

Boy oh  boy is Dov right [as usual]... as I found out to my cost recently when  going x-platform with a Frutiger mix. Heap Bad Juju :-(

My 10c...

. You have a x-platform requirement with your Mac Illustrator. Big Warning Sign.

. You have a non-European font requirement with Japanese and Chinese. Big Warning Sign.

I  am not qualified to comment here, but Paul Findon, sometimes on this  group and always on the 'FrameMaker for OS X' group, works in Japanese  in FrameMaker, I believe. I'm sure others on this group have relevant  experience too.

. Embedding is an attribute of the specific font  foundry's license terms. Usually you can, sometimes you can't. Take  care, read the small print.

. 'Is Helvetica different from Helvetica Neue and Neue Helvetica?' Yes.

The  Neue variants are a different font to the Helveticas. I believe that  Neue Helvetica is the Linotype variant, while Helvetica Neue is the  Adobe variant. I don't know how different they are. I *do* know that  recently acquiring a Linotype Frutiger rather than a Monotype Frutiger  involved me in about an extra 100 hours' work.

. The good  on-line font sites such as Linotype, Monotype (www.fonts.com) and  Bitstream have a lot of backing material that explains the origin and  sometimes the purpose of individual fonts. In the UK at least, too, a  phone call to Monotype gets you through to some very knowledgeable and  helpful people.

. You can sometimes, but not always, make  financial savings by buying font family packages. It all depends on the  size of the family (some are huge) vs. the faces you actually need.

.  OpenType is allegedly the 'way forward', but I've never used it with  FrameMaker so I cannot comment. Others will be able to advise you.

.  'Often, however, they'll make very broad statements without a lot of  specifics because their goal is to create a degree of uniformity  without boxing in the different divisions and functions in ways that  would inhibit their routine tasks. That might explain identifying a  font family as a standard but going no further'

This will bite back very hard on costs unless more granularity is added to the specification.

. Guy is very, very right ;-)

-- 
Steve