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two questions
by Larson, Timothy E.
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First, a non-FF-specific question. Are there some good resources online to help newbie type designers? Like, elements of good type style, general guidelines, etc.
Second, can someone please explain the difference between fontname, family name, name for humans, and base filename? I would like to create a family of fonts, but do not understand the interplay between these four, which I presume is fairly important to making it work right! Thanks, Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Fontforge-users mailing list Fontforge-users@... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-users |
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Re: two questions
by Jason Pagura
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On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Larson, Timothy E. <TELarson@...> wrote:
> First, a non-FF-specific question. Are there some good resources online to help newbie type designers? Like, elements of good type style, general guidelines, etc. > > Second, can someone please explain the difference between fontname, family name, name for humans, and base filename? I would like to create a family of fonts, but do not understand the interplay between these four, which I presume is fairly important to making it work right! > > > Thanks, > Tim > Try these to start: http://typophile.com/courses/type101 http://typophile.com/courses/type110 That whole Typophile.com site is full of great information and links to other type sites, plus blogs and a forum full of knowledgeable and helpful pros. As for your second question, I kind of know, but can't give a clear answer for that. Anyone? -- -- Jason Pagura zimbach at gmail dot com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Fontforge-users mailing list Fontforge-users@... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-users |
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Re: two questions
by George Williams
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On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 11:41, Larson, Timothy E. wrote:
> Second, can someone please explain the difference between fontname, > family name, name for humans, and base filename? I would like to > create a family of fonts, but do not understand the interplay between > these four, which I presume is fairly important to making it work > right! The distinctions here are fairly easy to explain. Unfortunately there are other names which get confusing. These four were invented for PostScript. The "name for humans" is the name traditionally associated with a font. It might be something like "ITC New Century Schoolbook Italic #4". It's a string which applications can use to display when they want humans to know what the font is. The fontname exists because PostScript is a programming language and this is the name used to identify the font >within PostScript<. It has restrictions on the characters which may be in the name (no spaces is the biggest. but it also can't look like a number, no parentheses, etc.). It might look like "ITCNewCenturySchoolbook-Italic". The family name is the name of a family of related fonts. In the above example "ITC New Century Schoolbook" would probably be the family name. "Base Filename" isn't really a name associated with the font itself. It's just there to make your life easier when using fontforge. When you generate a font, ff will pick a default filename for you (you can always change it, of course, but it is handy if the default name is the one you want to use). Normally the default name will be just the fontname with an extension added (ITCNewCenturySchoolbook-Italic.ttf). But sometimes people want a different name for the default, perhaps just NewCentSchlBk-Ital.ttf. This lets you do than. So it controls the default FILENAME for the file containing the font, and does not directly relate to anything in the font itself. ===================================================================== In addition to the "Names" pane of Font Info, there is also a TTF Names pane. In many ways this is a duplicate of the Names pane. It is used to specify names for sfnts (that is the grand lump of truetype, opentype and a few more obscure file formats). It is possible (though I would not recommend it) to have a PostScript Font in an sfnt wrapper with different values in the Names and TTF Names panes. Anyway. Here you have * Family This corresponds to the PostScript Family * SubFamily This might be "Bold", "Italic", "Bold Italic", "SemiBold", "Condensed", ... Whatever is appropriate for your font. * Fullname This corresponds to the "Name for humans" Generally FontForge will set all these fields appropriately (ie. same as in the Names pane). If you don't like the name ff chooses you can disassociate it from the PS name by right clicking on the entry and choosing from the popup menu. ==================================================== Further complicating things, there are fields * WWS Family * WWS SubFamily I don't really understand why these are needed, but MicroSoft thinks they are. As far as I can tell they should (in most cases) be the same as Family and SubFamily above, and should therefore be omitted. ===================================================== CID fontname should be ignored unless you are building a CID keyed font (which usually means you are working on a CJK font). ===================================================== Compatible Fullname Is another name I don't see the need for. I think it should be the same as Fullname, and should be omitted. ===================================================== TTF Names may be specified in more than one language and writing system. The entry which is translated most frequently is SubFamily. So for an Italic font, you would have an English entry "Italic", and perhaps * French, Italique * German, Kursiv * Dutch, Cursief etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Fontforge-users mailing list Fontforge-users@... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-users |
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Re: two questions
by Larson, Timothy E.
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> These four were invented for PostScript.
Thanks very much! So all in all, if I want fonts to be in the same family, the family name MUST be the same in all of them, BUT all the others HAVE to be unique to that font. (Same fontname would confuse Postscript, same human name would confuse people, same filename would result in the OS overwriting the file.) Right? > In addition to the "Names" pane of Font Info, there is also a TTF Names > pane. What does the color difference (red v black) signify here? It appears that red might be a default? Would it make sense to put Names and TTF Names on the same panel, so it is more clear how they are related? (And maybe Names should be renamed to PS Names.) Right now it seems that the relationship is one-way; any changes in TTF Names overrides the defaults but does not propogate back to Names. Putting them on the same pane, side by side, with a control to explicitly set/break the correspondence would clarify things. > Here you have > * Family > This corresponds to the PostScript Family > * SubFamily > This might be "Bold", "Italic", "Bold Italic", "SemiBold", > "Condensed", ... > Whatever is appropriate for your font. > * Fullname > This corresponds to the "Name for humans" Where does UniqueID fit in? Should this be changed when versioning, or not? I'd thought that maybe there was a simple answer to Qianqian Fang's question (about distributed OT/TT fonts) here, just by using the same (PS) fontname and (TTF) fullname while having different filenames. But it doesn't appear to be the case??? Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Fontforge-users mailing list Fontforge-users@... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-users |
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Re: two questions
by George Williams
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On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 11:09, Larson, Timothy E. wrote:
> So all in all, if I want fonts to be in the same family, the family > name MUST be the same in all of them, BUT all the others HAVE to be > unique to that font. (Same fontname would confuse Postscript, same > human name would confuse people, same filename would result in the OS > overwriting the file.) Right? Basically yes. There might be some occasions where you'd want something different, but they would be rare. > What does the color difference (red v black) signify here? It appears > that red might be a default? Red means the name is locked to the equivalent PostScript name (the thing in the Names pane) and you can only change it there. As I said you can unlock with a right button click an selecting the appropriate menu item. > > Would it make sense to put Names and TTF Names on the same panel, so > it is more clear how they are related? Feel free. The code is at your disposal. > Where does UniqueID fit in? Should this be changed when versioning, or not? This is now obsolete. Ignore it. > > I'd thought that maybe there was a simple answer to Qianqian Fang's > question (about distributed OT/TT fonts) here, just by using the same > (PS) fontname and (TTF) fullname while having different filenames. > But it doesn't appear to be the case??? He wants to use the same fontname for multiple fonts which are logically connected into a unified whole but which need to be physically disjoint due to limitations in the font technology as it now stands. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Fontforge-users mailing list Fontforge-users@... https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-users |
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