I have a question, and in tonight’s meeting of the Rhetoricians’ Guild I will put it to you: Does there exist a fundamental – nay, an innate right to Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic?
I say no!
It is insupportable, Ladies and Gentlemen, Children and Animals of the Field, that one should hold, as my opponent does, that ownership of a Roman typeface, notwithstanding ownership of a Roman nose, also grants ownership of other members of that Family, if indeed such members exist.
Worse even than this base assumption is the notion that new family members may be generated if they do not exist. These false variants may be called “Obliqued,” or “Smeared,” but we know them for what they are – misshapen spawn of character outlines forced against their will to produce a mockery of their upright forms.
This cannot stand!
Fade to reasonable
Ranting and railing aside, what is the best way to choose a Bold, Italic, or Bold Italic member of a font family? What happens when you use your desktop typesetting program’s shortcuts for applying a “type style”? What is a type style, anyway? Why did I get Courier where I expected to see Minion Bold when I printed my publication on film at an imagesetting service bureau?
There’s no one easy answer to the above questions. Font installation issues vary tremendously from one system to another and from one platform to another. The best I can do is offer a little history, a series of notes reflecting the current state of the art, and a few suggestions.
To narrow the focus of this column, I’ll concentrate on PostScript Type 1 fonts (not TrueType or OpenType fonts), and will assume that you’re using Adobe Type Manager (though not necessarily Adobe Type Manager Deluxe), also known as ATM. If you’re using Windows, you have to use ATM to use PostScript Type 1 fonts.
Historical notes
First, what the heck is a “type style,” anyway? The answer depends on your definition of “font,” or “typeface.”
In the days of metal type, things were clearer – not only were a type family’s bold or italic members (if it had any) kept in different type cases, but every type size was clearly a different font. In phototypesetting, a particular set of character outlines constituted a font, regardless of type size, but there was a clear distinction between the different weights or styles (and, frequently, they were on different filmstrips or discs). Even after the introduction of digital typesetting, bold weights or italic companion faces were still considered separate fonts. It was the desktop publishing fad that brought the confusion.
The early Macintosh systems came with several screen fonts – “Chicago,” “Monaco,” “Geneva,” and, of course, the rather goofy “San Francisco.” Applying one of the “type styles” available in MacWrite and MacPaint would change the appearance of the bitmap characters on your screen – adding pixels around the edges for bold, creating a slanted version for italic, and so on. This behavior was then carried over to “real” type when it arrived on the Macintosh platform (with the introduction of the LaserWriter PostScript printer). This approach was then copied, along with a number of other Macintosh innovations, by Microsoft Windows.
If you look at the PostScript code generated by early desktop typesetting programs, such as PageMaker, you’ll see that routines were set up to emulate the system’s ability to create new font variants “on the fly” when the printer font was not found.*
If nothing else, this code taught us two things:
You cannot create a true “bold” font by increasing the stroke width of the character outlines.
You cannot create a true “italic” font by slanting the characters.
And so to the present day
The following points provide a snapshot of where we stand today.
On the Macintosh side, things are a little bit more complicated than they are in Windows. Fonts on the Macintosh are a tag-team production: you have a screen (or “bitmap”) font that’s used for displaying characters on the screen, and you have an outline (or “printer”) font that’s meant for printing. When you lay out and format a publication using the character shapes from the screen font, it’s the printer font that gets sent to the printer. ATM also uses the outline font to generate smooth characters for screen display, or for printing to non-PostScript printers.
A very common Macintosh problem occurs when you have the screen font for a bold, italic, or bold italic font, but do not have the printer font (and that outline font is not available on the printer or imagesetter you’re printing to). Usually, you’ll notice that text that was formatted to use the font looks jagged on your screen; this is because ATM can’t find the outline. If you don’t catch this problem before printing, however, the printer will print characters using the printer’s default font – usually Courier or Times. This means you often end up with expensive pieces of imagesetting film you can’t use.
In Windows, you don’t have the screen font/printer font tag-team confusion, but Windows does believe you are entitled to Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic versions of any font on your system. Both PageMaker and XPress play along – so, again, you’ve got to be careful.
For the most part, desktop typesetting programs such as QuarkXPress and PageMaker switch to the correct printer font when you apply one of the program’s “shortcut” type styles. These applications refer to the fonts on your system by name, not by number, which decreases the chance that changes to your installed fonts will result in your documents being reformatted using the wrong font (as sometimes happens in, for example, Microsoft Word).
The trouble is that these applications let you apply the Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic type styles even when no corresponding font exists in the type family of the selected text.
InDesign, Illustrator, and FreeHand all prevent you from choosing fonts that aren’t installed on your system, through the design of their font selection user interface. This might seem a little dictatorial, but it’s one case where a little dictatorship is probably a good thing.
When your font installation – your font management program, system version, and font manufacturer – differs from the setup used by your imagesetting service bureau, trouble can ensue. This doesn’t mean that problems are unavoidable, just that you’ve got to use caution. Ideally, you shouldn’t give your service bureau “live” files – instead, provide PostScript or Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files. When you do this, you can essentially “freeze” the composition of your publication at your system. This is a very large topic, and one I’d better save for a future column.
Complicating matters, both platforms feature (are cursed with?) a variety of font menu enhancement utilities, which in come cases exacerbate the problem.
Prescriptions and prohibitions
So – what should you do?
If you’re using Adobe Type Reunion,* choose the appropriate font from the submenu that ATR displays next to the type family name, rather than using your program’s type-style shortcuts.
If you’re not using ATR, and are using a Macintosh, select the name of the font you want from the type menu. If you want to use Helvetica Bold, choose “B Helvetica Bold.” Again, don’t use your desktop typesetting program’s type-style shortcuts.
If you’re using FreeHand or InDesign, you can ignore the above and use the program’s shortcuts – when you do, the programs intelligently switch to the correct font. In InDesign, for example, when you select some text formatted using Times Roman and press Command-Shift-B/Ctrl-Shift-B, InDesign selects Times Bold. If no font corresponding to the shortcut is found on your system, InDesign does not change the formatting of the selection.**
Closing arguments
…and so, in summary, let me say: Just say no to fake fonts!
There’s lots more to setting up fonts on your system – using a good font management program (such at ATM Deluxe on either platform or MasterJuggler, Suitcase 8, or FontReserve on the Macintosh) is a good first step toward font sanity. But that’s another topic.