Conversion: Font best practice

Introduction

Fonts are today pieces of software. There is a huge amount of work in a every single font that can’t be done without the proper know-how.
A complete font set (let’s say Garamond) requires years to be built and compiled. Behind every single character there are dozens of pathpoints, measurements, hint metadata, scripts.
In order to prevent fonts issues, many standards has been created and other has been adopted.
The strict respect of those standards (both from font publishers and from users) will results in 0% problems during the everyday work.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The quality of a font is evaluated on two different layers: design and data.
The design is what you see on the page and relies on history and culture, while the data works behind the scenes and have impact on how the characters are handled by the software you are using.
Given that the production of a good font requires knowledge and investment, the two quality layers are strictly connected each other.
Following there is an example of the font quality scenario when using softwares. In a well done serif font, the small caps alphabet should be designed apart from the caps alphabet – that’s for readability reasons.
Small caps characters have their own charset codification which differs from the normal caps.

Open

To meet the right quality and usability, a font should be well designed and, at the same time, programmed with the right metadata that systems will use to compose the text stream.
Needless to say, free fonts cannot achieve this result and cannot guarantee stability.

CHILI Scenario

In order to get the highest quality and standard compatibility, the CHILI Publisher supports fonts that meets the following simple requisites:

• Format is OpenType

• Font file is produced and compiled after year 2001 in a native OpenType fashion

• The original file is used – not converted from other formats

• All glyphs are in the Unicode charset (plane 0, from 0000 to FFFF)

Following these rules, these advantages are guaranteed:

• Glyphs will look the same in InDesign, in CHILI Publisher, as well as in other professional layout softwares

• No missing glyphs

• No conversion errors from InDesign to CHILI and vice versa

• No font name conflicts

• Perfect compatibility between InDesign text styles and CHILI Publisher text styles (on supported OpenType features)

• Priority support on fonts issues

• Long term compatibility

Windows TrueType fonts are good too, although the TrueType format (TTF) can’t support so much data as the OpenType format does, and can give unexpected results in professional output.

Choosing the right font distributor

The best choice for buying fonts are the brands distributors: Adobe, Linotype, FontShop are the biggest.
Other quality players are: LucasFonts, Jeremy Tankard (typography.net), Anatoletype, Hoefler & Frere-Jones (typography.com).
These distributors offer high quality fonts and many of them produce libraries and bundles containing the most used types.

Choosing the right edition

Font producers compile their fonts in different formats and standards.
For CHILI Publisher you have the option between “OpenType and OpenType TrueType”:

Open

Card of Fontshop.com

In case a font is not available in OpenType

When the font is not available in OpenType/TrueType format, it should not be used for long texts.
The only way to obtain reliable conversion from InDesign with a non-OpenType font is to convert the text in outlines.
In InDesign, select the text frame with the selection tool and choose Create Outlines from the Type menu.

Font format checks

Before convert a document from InDesign to CHILI, please check the Find font… window: only OpenType fonts should be present:

Conversion between formats

The homemade conversion between font formats (e.g. from Type1 to OpenType) is not permitted.
Although some tools can produce converted font files, the result will be out of standard and will cause conversion issues in most of the cases.
Standard support is not provided for documents composed with converted fonts; moreover, it’s a font license violation. 

Unicode charset and checks

Unicode is a worldwide industry standard for the encoding of text. As long as characters relies on the Unicode charset, the conversion between different systems is easy.
In the Unicode charset, every character is assigned to a specific code, which is identical on every system. The code is an hexadecimal number between 0000 and FFFF.
An OpenType font can accommodates up to 65536 Unicode glyphs. A significant name is also assigned to every standard glyph.
You can check directly in InDesign if a specific character is in the Unicode scope: open the Glyphs panel and point the cursor on the character you want to check (you can also select a character in the text for faster search).
Here is a standard glyph, the “A” capital letter, which corresponds to Unicode 0041. This character will be converted correctly from InDesign to CHILI and vice versa:

Here is a character that do not have a Unicode code and will be lost during conversion:

About scaling and skewing

Adobe InDesign let you scale and skew letters. This is not a standard font feature and rely on the application output engine.
Scaling and skewing should be always avoided in layouts because can give unexpected result during PDF output.
In order to guarantee an affordable output, these feature are not available in the CHILI Editor. Over technical issues, scaling a font is a bad graphic layout practice.
In case the scaling is functional to titling special effects, please convert the text to outline before importing, using Create outlines frm the Type menu.

Where to install font files for CHILI conversion

Font files should be installed only in the standard system folders:

• c:\Windows\Fonts (Windows)

• /Library/Fonts (OS X)

• ~/Library/Fonts (OS X)

Font managers are supported in general as long as a professional edition is used (FontExplorerX, Extensis Fusion, FontAgent).
The font cache should be cleaned up on a regular basis using one of these professional tool. For good results we recommend FontExplorerX by LinoType