Font naming problems

[aaronkneile]

Hello all,

I am a new user of Fontographer, and have been working on getting the right naming for a font family. I've made several weights of my new font: (light, regular, semibold, and bold), and want to use them in Microsoft Office as True Type. When the user hits the "B" button to bold, I want the font to go from whatever weight they are on, to the next heavier weight. So, if they're using light, they then go to regular. If they have selected regular, they go to semibold, etc. Obviously, if they're on bold, it won't get any bolder. What I want to avoid is the crummy fake-bold that Microsoft gives you. I did read the manual but didn't quite find the detail of answer I was looking for. So I searched the forums and found a solution. (thanks to the original solver: I can't seem to locate the original post, so I can't give credit, sorry) Anyway, the solution proposed by the poster was kind of like this:

http://www.aaronkneile.com/fontproblem.html

But if you read the table, the problem becomes clear. The light font becomes the semibold, and the regular becomes the Bold; which to me isn't intuitive. I want the users to select any of the four fonts and have the bold button bump them up a weight. (Except for the bold, which is as far as I feel like taking it, frankly.)

So I could switch the SGNs and have light and regular in the same grouping, and semibold and bold, but the problem is that I want people in Regular (which will be the most widely used font, to be able to get to semibold by hitting the bold button. and Semibold to take them to Bold. I tried making duplicate fonts and extra groupings, but didn't get the results I was looking for.

Anyone know how to make this happen? I'm not a serious font designer (though I have great respect for those that are!). Can anyone point me to a detailed answer or table? Is there an error in my thinking?

Just to summarize. All four weights will be available in the font menu. The bold button should do this:
   - Make light go to regular weight.
   - Make the regular font go to semibold weight
   - Make the semibold font go to bold
   - Do nothing to the bold

If I'm not clear, let me know and I'll try to clarify. And thanks in advance for all your help!

[aaronkneile]

Wow, nobody knows about this one? Maybe did I post in the wrong place?

[Mark Simonson]

I wish it could work that way, but what you are proposing is not possible. It's not a limitation of Fontographer, but of the way font naming works.

The "bold" button can only toggle between two fonts, usually "plain" and "bold". Same thing with the "italic" button. The only exception is that if the selection is already "bold" or "italic" and you click on "italic" or "bold" (respectively), then the "bold italic" is selected. This set up only works with up to four fonts mapped to a "plain"/"italic"/"bold"/"bold italic" pattern and assigned to a single family, or subfamily of a larger family.

In order for your proposed behavior to work (i.e., with a large multi-weight family), you would somehow have to change the style mappings and/or the subfamily designations on the fly, which is simply not possible.

It would be possible for an application to this by looking at the weight designations (given as numbers between 1 and 1000 in the OS/2 table), rather than looking at the style mappings, maybe with new buttons called "bolder" and "lighter" in addition to the "bold" button. I know of no application that does this, however.

[aaronkneile]

Well actually, I was able to trick it out a bit. I created several different font families: One was "Light", one was "Regular," etc. Then within each font family, I had 4 versions (regular, ital, bold, and bold ital). The Bold and Bold Ital were duplicates of the next size up regular. I'm probably not explaining it very well.

For example HSJOY Light was light. HSJOY Light Bold was a duplicate of regular. Then HSJOY regular was regular, and HSJOY Regular Bold, was a duplicate of HSJOY Semibold. etc, etc. That way, when they hit the "B" to bold, they get the equivalent of the next size up.

It meant duplicate fonts to pull it off, and it's clunky, but it seems to work. I'm still testing to make sure it's working on other machines. Thanks for your help, and best of luck to you!

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