Using Fonts in Adobe Creative Suite


If words are the basic building blocks of a writer, fonts are the foundation elements for a graphic designer when working with text. The words carry the message of the writer about the subject, but the skillful choice of a font for displaying the text enhances the message, and can dramatize it and make it come alive. The fonts shouldn't call attention to themselves, but should be in the background, setting the stage and tone for the message.

One of the first choices a designer makes is what basic typefaces that will be used in a printed piece whether it be a single brochure, a magazine, a book, or any other publication. The Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications have features that make this process easy.

Behind the Scenes: A Short History of Fonts

The year 1985 was a milestone in the history of publishing. It marked the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter, the first desktop printer capable of producing high-quality type at an affordable price. This printer used PostScript, a revolutionary new printer language developed by a small Silicon Valley startup company named Adobe Systems.

From the beginning, Adobe's founders, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, put great importance in the quality of the fonts used in their PostScript printers. They initially created a font library by converting existing designs from Linotype, a century-old typesetter manufacturer. They created their publishing revolution by storing their fonts in a vector format that could be used on any PostScript printerfrom a 300-dpi LaserWriter to a 2540-dpi Linotype imagesetter. Unlike earlier printer fonts, vector fonts are scalable and can be used at any size. The company assembled a world-class team of type designers and technicians, and soon they also began to develop their own original typefaces. Adobe created posters and brochures to promote PostScript typesetting, and they empowered graphic designers around the world to set their own high-quality type.

When PostScript took off as a page-description language for laser printers and imagesetters, Adobe became wildly successful at selling their PostScript fonts to publishers. Other companies created PostScript fonts, but Adobe had a "secret recipe." Because they were the developers of PostScript, their proprietary PostScript Type 1 fonts looked better than those of their competitors. Other companies created Type 3 fonts following the PostScript format that Adobe documented, but their fonts lacked hinting, which the Type 1 fonts had. Hinting is the rules built into the font that makes it look good onscreen or on low-resolution printers when there aren't many pixels to work with.

Apple and Microsoft, developers of the operating systems that PostScript fonts worked on, weren't happy that they had to license fonts from Adobe. Apple developed its own competing vector font formatTrueTypewhich they licensed to Microsoft. In both formats, fonts were scalable and resolution-independent. Each font format used some form of hinting. In response, Adobe was forced to open up and publish its Type 1 format in 1990, and Adobe developed software called Adobe Type Manager for the onscreen display of their fonts. (Until then, PostScript fonts could only use bitmap previews at fixed sizes onscreen.) Immediately, all font vendors switched to the improved Type 1 format, and Type 3 has almost disappeared.

In the first few years of the desktop publishing revolution that Adobe PostScript started, a battle royal between two competing font standards ensued. The PostScript Type 1 format was widely adopted in the publishing industry. TrueType fonts were distributed for both the Mac OS and Windows operating systems by Apple and Microsoft, so most office workers used these fonts. The "font wars" ended when Adobe worked with Microsoft to build a third kind of font that overcame some of the limitations of the other two formatsOpenType. Nowadays, all three font formats are used in publishing, but OpenType has some advantages over the other two formats.


Font Formats

The Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications support the three primary font formats used in electronic publishing:

  • PostScript Type 1. This is the font format developed originally by Adobe as a proprietary format. PostScript Type 1 fonts are stored as two files: The scalable outlines are stored in one, and fixed-size bitmaps for the screen and metric information in the other. This format is most widely used by graphics professionals and is available from all font developers.

  • TrueType. This font format is most popular with general computer users and is also available from all font makers. The font outlines and metrics are stored in a single file. In the early days, these fonts could cause problems for PostScript RIPs, but these days they can be used interchangeably with PostScript Type 1 fonts.

  • OpenType. This is the newest font format, which overcomes some of the limitations of PostScript and TrueType fonts. Adobe and Microsoft developed this format originally, but OpenType fonts are now being released by most font vendors.

Choosing Fonts

Within CS2 applications, you can choose the fonts for your document either from a menu or a palette. In InDesign or Illustrator, you can choose Type > Font, or you can choose the Font menu in either the Control or Character palette. In Photoshop, you must first create an editable type layer by clicking on your image with the Type tool. Then you can choose a font from the Font menu that appears on the Options bar, or from the Font menu of the Character palette (click the Toggle The Character And Paragraph Palettes button on the Options bar to make this visible).

All of the CS2 applications now display a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) font menu (Figure 6-1). You can identify OpenType fonts by the "O" icon beside their name. PostScript Type 1 fonts show the red "a" icon, and TrueType fonts show the blue "TT." In each application, you can choose the size of the font preview by going to the Type Preferences, or you can turn the preview off by unchecking Font Preview Size.

Figure 6-1. In CS2 applications, you can view samples of the fonts you currently have open.


You may understandably be confused by the ordering of font names in the menus of CS2 applications. They don't match the font ordering in other applications. Here's how CS2 applications build their menus:

  • In general, the fonts are alphabetized. However, Adobe CS2 applications ignore certain prefixes for the alphabetization. In Figure 6-1, notice how the words Adobe, ITC, and Stempel are ignored so that all of the Garamond fonts are grouped together. Adobe feels you are more likely to want to see those fonts in a group than to scroll through a long menu looking for variations of Garamond.

  • The Adobe CS2 applications then try to group fonts by the font family primary script (main language group supported). This makes it easier to find the fonts for Western languages in a group rather than wade through Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Chinese fonts which have names that may be meaningless to English speakers. Kozuka Gothic Pro, for example, will probably be found at the bottom of the menu with other Japanese fonts. However, this rule is not always followed strictly, since many OpenType fonts support multiple language groups. All Adobe Pro OpenType fonts support at least Western languages (MacRoman/WinANSI) plus a set of Central European languages.

  • If you upgrade from previous versions of the Adobe Creative Suite applications, you may find that the font menus have been rearranged. Creative Suite 2 fixes some issues in determining a primary script.

When Good Fonts Go Bad

Most experienced creative professionals would probably agree that working with fonts can be one of the most problematic issues in working with graphics applications. There are several reasons for this:

  • It's common to have multiple fonts with similar names, which can get mixed up or be open simultaneously. (Fonts are open when they are installed in an operating system location that makes them available to your applications, or when they're "turned on" by a font manager application.) If you choose the wrong font, type can reflow, or an incorrect character can appear.

  • Fonts can get corrupted if they are open when computers crash. In turn, a corrupt font is one of the most common causes of application crashes. Diagnosing which font is causing the problem requires great patience.

  • Until the advent of OpenType, the file formats and character sets of Macintosh and Windows fonts differed. This would cause problems if you wanted to share your file with someone working on the other platform.

The CS2 applications can help you deal with these problems to some degree. (However, many font problems are due to poor font management and organization, and the applications can't clean up your mess for you!) They can let you know when a font isn't available when you open up a document, such as the dialog box InDesign displays (see Figure 6-2).

Figure 6-2. In InDesign CS2, the Missing Fonts dialog box tells you about missing fonts when you open a document.


InDesign and Illustrator also provide dialog boxes to help you identify which fonts are open or missing in a document (Type > Find Font) see Figure 6-3. You can identify the font type, and if more than one font of the same name is open, they'll show them both separately. You can use the dialog box to get more information about where the font is located in the document, and you can replace it with a different font if necessary. When you click a font name, be sure to click the More Info button to see all the information.

Figure 6-3. InDesign CS2's Find Font dialog box provides valuable font informationits PostScript name and where it's located in the documentto help you deal with font problems. This information is shown when you click the More Info button.




Real World(c) Adobe Creative Suite 2
Real World Adobe Creative Suite 2
ISBN: 0321334124
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 192

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