With literally thousands upon thousands of fonts to choose from, it's important to know the different formats and which ones are best suited for your individual working environment. Ideally, you should have a thorough knowledge of all the fonts currently installed on your system.

The various font types are covered in the following sections.

You can copy an OpenType font from Mac to Windows and vice versa. The OpenType format is supported for font embedding in Adobe PDFs. Fonts produced with this technology are as reliable as you find with Type 1 and Type 42 fonts. In addition, OpenType offers a means for flagging the fonts for embedding permissions.

The OpenType format is an extension of the TrueType SFNT format that also can support Adobe PostScript font data and new typographic features. OpenType fonts containing PostScript data, such as those in the Adobe Type Library, have a filename extension of .otf, while TrueType-based OpenType fonts have a .ttf extension.

OpenType fonts can include an expanded character set and layout features, providing broader linguistic support and more precise typographic control. Feature-rich Adobe OpenType fonts can be identified by the word "Pro" in their name. OpenType fonts can be installed and used alongside PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts.

Creative Suite 1 came with 83 OpenType fonts that are installed as part of the Illustrator CS application. If you upgraded the Creative Suite you have these fonts available. In addition, the Creative Suite 2 included more than 180 bundled fonts—most of which are OpenType fonts. The CS3 applications came with more than 30 OpenType fonts. In CS5 the fonts are installed in your application folders. OpenType fonts offer you an extended set of characters where you find more ligatures (character combinations) and special characters and symbols. Whereas PostScript fonts offer you a maximum of 256 glyphs (individual characters), OpenType fonts can contain more than 65,000 glyphs. Look for the OpenType "Pro" fonts and you'll find extended character sets.

As a standard of practice, you would be wise to replace your TrueType and PostScript fonts with OpenType fonts. This is likely to be an expensive proposition, but if you gradually begin to convert your font library and acquire new fonts in OpenType format, you'll benefit by having access to more characters, enhanced typographic features, and increased printing reliability.

Fonts generally carry licensing restrictions, and you need to be sure to honor them. This can be a confusing issue, however, because different font manufacturers impose different restrictions, and many licensing agreements are difficult to interpret. In order to provide font files to your service center or printer, developers often require you to get permission to distribute the font. Many developers prohibit such distribution altogether. In addition, some developers prohibit font embedding as you might do in programs like Acrobat. It's important to be aware of these limitations.

One possible way around font licensing issues is by converting any type not within your service provider's library to outlines in your documents before submitting them. In this way, the type becomes a graphic, and you don't need to copy your font files. This eliminates the transfer of the font's computer code, which is protected by copyright law. As a matter of practice, you should avoid converting large bodies of type to outlines, but in an emergency situation, it may mean the difference between getting the job out on time or not at all.

Mac OS X allows you to create accounts for multiple users, and you can choose to install fonts at the system level so all users of the computer have access to the same fonts, or you can store the fonts in individual users' Home folders to make them accessible only to a specific user.

Fonts for the Mac are installed in these locations:

By default, system fonts are installed in one of the above four font locations. In addition, some fonts required by applications are also installed in these locations. Many CS applications contain font folders inside the application's folders where fonts are installed. However, for creative professionals who use fonts for design purposes where operating systems do not require the fonts, you should build a separate folder on your hard drive and copy all your fonts to the folder. Use a font management utility such as FontAgent Pro to load and unload fonts as needed for any given project.

For Windows, like the Mac, you're best served by using a font utility.

STEPS: Installing Fonts

Figure 14.1. Open the Fonts dialog box and choose File

Install New Font to install TrueType fonts in Windows.

Fonts are also located in the Windows/Fonts folder. On your boot drive (usually drive C:), open the folder and copy PostScript and OpenType fonts to this folder.

Fonts play a crucial role in any designer's work. Thus, it's important to take some time to learn how to best organize your fonts to ensure maximum productivity. The amount of time you invest up front in organizing your fonts will more than pay off down the road, especially if you face an eleventh-hour deadline and can't afford for anything to go wrong at the last minute.

Check your computer's fonts on a regular basis to be sure they are organized properly. Whenever you add, move or delete fonts, there is a chance that something can go awry. Or, if you install a new operating system or font-management utility, you may need to reorganize your fonts, throw out obsolete formats, or replace existing formats to become more compatible with your current operating system and programs. If you continue to use old fonts that aren't optimized for current technology, you'll eventually experience problems.

On the other hand, if you use high-quality fonts designed to work with current software and output devices, you avoid annoying imaging problems. One of the more common font errors is the inability of the printing device to recognize the font information in the file. The printing device then automatically substitutes a default font for the one you specified, with the end result looking nothing like what you intended. Thus, choosing fonts that have a high degree of printing reliability may mean the difference between getting the job out on time and missing a critical deadline.

Font-management tools greatly facilitate font accessibility and usage. They also help prevent the installation of duplicate fonts, especially on the Mac. Mac OS X users have a utility that ships with the operating system called Font Book. Font Book 2.2.1 is installed with OS X Snow Leopard. This is a good, basic utility that allows you to enable and disable fonts. It doesn't offer the convenience of auto-activation, however. You can also use third-party tools such as Suitcase or FontAgent Pro.

Using Font Book (Macintosh)

Like the other font management utilities, Font Book offers you an option for detecting corrupt fonts. If you use Font Book and you suspect a font may be corrupted, use the validation features in Font Book to be certain your font is usable.

Open Font Book (installed in your Applications folder), select a font appearing in the Font list, and select Validate Font from the pull-down menu in the top left corner of the Font Book dialog box. The Font Validation dialog box opens as shown in Figure 14.2. The dialog box displays the selected font with icons representing the validation results. A checkmark icon informs you the font passed validation.

Figure 14.2. Select Validate Font from the Font Book pull-down menu and the validation results are reported for the selected font.

Another nice feature in Font Book is the ability to easily size fonts for previews. Suitcase and FontAgent Pro offer you the option to preview different sizes, but Font Book provides you a slider to size up and down the font preview. Rather than select fixed sizes or type a point size in a text box like you do in Suitcase, just drag the slider up or down to size the font and see the results dynamically in the preview area, as shown in Figure 14.3.

Figure 14.3. Drag the slider on the far right of the window to size the preview up or down.

Using FontAgent Pro

Perhaps the most aggravating nightmare for creative professionals on Macintosh OS X is related to reliable font activation. You may have copied fonts to all of the system font locations (see the section "Installing Fonts on the Macintosh") and find one of the CS programs informing you a font is missing. You then uninstall the font from system font folders, attempt to load the font in another font management utility, and an alert dialog box opens informing you the font is already loaded by the system. Your aggravation continues as you poke around your hard drive trying to find a way to load the offending font and make it available to the CS programs.

If you're a designer who has experienced problems with alert dialog boxes informing you that a font is not available, we have a solution for you. FontAgent Pro from Insider Software (www.insidersoftware.com) solves annoying font-management problems. This $99 (as of this writing) utility is our personal choice for reliable font management on the Macintosh.

When you install FontAgent Pro (FAP), the first thing you encounter in the install wizard is a dialog box prompting you to import your fonts into a user-defined font folder FAP manages. During the import process, FAP isolates corrupt and duplicate fonts and stores them in folders apart from your font library where the reliable fonts are stored. Fonts are organized in folders and subfolders for each font family. With this feature in FAP, you don't need to use Font Book's validation options.

One very nice feature is that FAP automatically splits font suitcases into one font style per set. This means you can activate only those fonts used in a design without loading the entire font family. When it comes time to send your files off to a service bureau or print shop, only the used fonts are packaged with the application document and file links.

Note

For information on packaging documents for service providers, see Chapter 36.

Auto-loading fonts

FontAgent Pro isn't stingy in supporting application programs with auto-loading features. Unlike other utilities that support only Illustrator CS and InDesign CS and that auto-load a font when the program launches an application document, FAP automatically loads a font from any application document you open. This could be your mail client, MS Office programs, text editors, or any document having a font not activated at the time of launch.

FontAgent Pro features

FontAgent Pro offers you an intuitive workspace where you can view and activate fonts, create new libraries and sets, share fonts in workgroups, and change the font display in the FAP window from lists to WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) views. The FontAgent Pro screen is shown in Figure 14.4.

Figure 14.4. FontAgent Pro offers an intuitive workspace where you can easily manage your fonts.

In addition to reliable font management, FAP also offers you some very nice options for viewing fonts in WYSIWYG style. From tools in the Font Player pane, you can view a selected font character set and a sample sentence in the view window. Click the Display Paragraph tool and the display changes to paragraphs of text set in Greek type. Moving to the right side of the Font Player pane, you have buttons that offer you a slide show. Select a root folder containing sub folders of font families and click the "Auto play fonts forward" (or backward) button and the window shows you a slide show of the fonts displayed in WYSIWYG views in the Font Player display window. This option lets you quickly view all font families within a given face. Another nice feature with Font Agent Pro is that you have options for identifying and finding fonts as well as purchasing fonts online.

Try before you buy

Obviously, there are many more features available than in this short description of FontAgent Pro. To test the product, visit the Insider Software Web site (www.insidersoftware.com) and download the free trial version. Insider Software offers you a 30-day free trial option where you can freely try all features and access the free user guide available as a PDF document. If font activation is a problem for you on Mac OS X, we guarantee this product is likely to solve all your font-management nightmares.

To convert type to outlines in Illustrator, select the type with either of the selection tools in the Tools palette. (Note that you cannot use the Type tool here as you can in InDesign.) Next, Choose Type

Figure 14.5. Type shown before and after converting to outlines. Each character becomes a compound path, which you can edit with the selection tools.

Creating type effects in Illustrator

The options are almost limitless when it comes to creating eye-catching type effects with Illustrator. You can apply custom gradients, transparency, meshes, shadows, lighting and shading, distortion, stylization, 3D effects, and more. Figure 14.6 shows an example of the 3D type effects you can achieve quickly in Illustrator. For a more in-depth look at the ways you can use Illustrator to enhance your type, see the Illustrator CS5 Bible by Ted Alspach (published by Wiley).

Figure 14.6. In Illustrator, this 3D effect was easily created using regular type (top) and then applying a stroke, gradient, extrude effect, warp effect, and drop shadow.

Creating type masks in Illustrator

Other interesting effects can be achieved by using type as a mask. Note that when creating type masks in Illustrator, you can create a mask without converting the type to outlines.

Position the type in front of the artwork that will be masked. Select both the type and the item to be masked by drawing a marquee around the objects or by Shift-clicking if necessary (two objects must be selected for this command to work). Then choose Object

Figure 14.7. You can create type masks in Illustrator without converting the text to outlines.

If it's a matter of printing a font, Photoshop files can always be rasterized in order to convert the type object to pixels. When type is rasterized in Photoshop it loses all the type attributes and prints like any Photoshop image.

In Photoshop CS5, you can also convert type to outlines. If you want to mask type originally created in Photoshop in Illustrator, you can convert the type to outlines in Photoshop and then import the Photoshop file into Illustrator, where you can apply the mask. Of course, if your mask object is in Photoshop, you can also mask type in Photoshop. With the new Photoshop CS features, you have a choice for where you want to apply type masks.

Photoshop type converted to outlines is recognized only in Illustrator. If you import a Photoshop file with outline type in InDesign, the text is not recognized as a vector object. To experiment a little with type converted as outlines in Photoshop, follow these steps.

STEPS: Converting Type to Outlines in Photoshop

You can create many effects for type masks in Photoshop as well as stylize type with shadows, embossing, filters, and brightness enhancements after rasterizing type. Photoshop's array of editing tools allows you to apply effects to type in the same way you apply them to images. When you create type in Photoshop, type is added to a separate layer and remains as a vector object until you either flatten the layers or rasterize a layer by choosing Layer

If you import Photoshop files in InDesign, text is rasterized. If you save a Photoshop file with a text layer as PDF, you can keep your type in vector form by saving the Photoshop document with layers. Formats that can preserve layers include the native PSD, Photoshop PDF, and TIFF. Saving with layers keeps type as text and it remains editable. If you flatten the layers, the text is rasterized and you lose the ability to edit your text.

If you open a Photoshop PDF file in Acrobat with layers and vector data preserved, the text is searchable and editable. If you open the same file in Illustrator, Illustrator automatically converts the type to outlines. The same file saved as a native Photoshop (PSD) file opened in Illustrator preserves all type editing.

The type effects you can create in Photoshop are mind-boggling. For comprehensive coverage, see the Photoshop CS5 Bible by Lisa DaNae Dayley and Brad Dayley (Wiley).

InDesign offers you the option for converting type to outlines as inline objects. With this feature, you can create many type effects directly in InDesign without having to create them in Illustrator and import them. After outlines have been created in InDesign, you have similar options as Illustrator for shaping text objects with the selection tools, as well as creating type masks.

To convert type to outlines in InDesign, select the characters you want to convert to outlines by highlighting them with the Type tool or by selecting the text frame with a selection tool. With the Type tool, you can select one character or a range of characters. If you want to convert your entire page to outlines as a workaround for font downloading problems or licensing issues, select all by choosing either of the selection tools in the Tools palette and then pressing

Creating type masks in InDesign

Type masks are created a little differently than they are in Illustrator. Instead of placing type over artwork to be masked, the type is essentially turned into a graphics frame. You can then paste or import an image into the frame.

After you've converted your type to outlines, simply select it and choose File

Figure 14.15. InDesign allows you to create sophisticated type effects without converting the type to outlines. The text remains fully editable.

Figure 14.16. After converting type to outlines, select the type with either the Selection tool or the Direct Selection tool.

When the Place dialog box appears, be certain to select the check box for Replace Selected Item, as shown in Figure 14.17. If you don't check the box, the cursor is loaded with the graphic and InDesign expects you to place the file somewhere on the document page. Alternately you can use the Place command and when the cursor is loaded with the object to place; just click on the object on the page to replace it. When you select Replace Selected Item, the file is placed within the outlined type, resulting in a mask. If you want to place an item in a multi-page document, be certain to select the Show Import Options check box as shown in Figure 14.17. You might use this option if you have a selected item on a master page and want to scroll pages in your document to choose what page to replace the graphic.

Figure 14.17. Be certain to select the check boxes for Replace Selected Item and Show Import Options in the Place dialog box.

When selecting Show Import Options, another dialog box appears. The type of dialog box and the options available are dependent on the file type you place. In Figure 14.18, the Place PDF dialog box opens because the file type being placed is a PDF. In the Preview window, you can navigate pages and see page thumbnails before committing to place the document.

Figure 14.18. Be certain to Show Import Options when placing multiple-page PDF documents and layered files.

InDesign provides options for selecting layers when you place Photoshop and PDF files. Click the Layers tab in the Place PDF dialog box and the Layers pane opens with choices for selecting layers on a given page to place. You toggle layers on and off like you do in any of the CS programs. Click the right-pointing arrow to open the nested layers and click the eye icon to toggle layers on and off. The Layers pane in the dialog box displays a preview of the selected layers, as you can see in Figure 14.19.

Figure 14.19. When you place layered Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and layered PDF files, you can click the Layers tab and toggle layer views.

Note

For more information on working with layers in the CS applications, see Chapter 23.

Click OK in the Place PDF dialog box and the layer view you see in the preview is placed inside the type, as shown in Figure 14.20. If you need to move the image within the mask, select the Direct Selection tool. When the cursor approaches the text, the cursor changes to a Hand tool, thus informing you that the image can be moved within the mask.

Tip

When you drag with the Hand tool, click and pause a moment. When you drag the cursor after pausing, you can see the entire image previewed as you move around the document window.

Figure 14.20. When the Replace Selected Item check box is selected, the image is placed within the selected object.