Adding glyphs to a font after two years?

[dzurn]

We have some custom fonts that our company has been using for some time which we use for printing our labeling and manuals (at commercial print vendors, etc).

Now headquarters has commissioned a new version with some added glyphs to be used instead of some of the existing glyphs. No problem there, except that they didn’t change the name of the font and expect us to use and distribute the new version, noting “please copy over your old version”

What I see is that we will never know for sure if our print vendors are using the updated font or not, for any particular job. If the font had a different name, then we are all familiar with the “Can’t find the font” warning. But this updated-but-the-same-name font is deliberately sidestepping this mechanism. I can’t really see the logic here, besides some misplaced idea of compatibility with existing documents.

I can foresee getting missing symbols with NO warning if the old version is used, which wouldn’t happen with a new name.

I've asked this question before in other forums, but not gotten any feedback.

Basically, not renaming the font seems to me to be so awful that I am at a loss why it might have been done this way. What are the “redeeming qualities” of NOT renaming an expanded font? Has this happened "successfully" for a commercial font, besides the "Euro" debacle?

Horror stories from the lives of Service Bureaus would be appropriate to help them reconsider this policy. (And so when I DO rename the font when we use it, it will be a little more defensible than “I thought it would be better this way”.)

BTW, the font is an OpenType font with about 50 symbols, adding glyphs for about a dozen. The original symbols will still be in the font, but the new ones are alternates that we are supposed to use. Predominant use is in Adobe Creative Suite, especially InDesign, but there’s also a Truetype version for our on-demand Windows printing software.

Real-life stories appreciated!

Thanks
Darryl

[Glagolitic]

Why not make a new style of the font with the same name? ie. italic?

[BobH]

Well, as a counter-example, how many times have the core Windows fonts (e.g., Times New Roman) been expanded? (The answer: many times).  And of course the reason for not changing the font name each time is for compatibility with existing style sheets and templates.

I would expect that if the print vendor used the old font with a new document they'd get square boxes (or whatever you have in glyph 0) showing up in the output. Seems an easy enough thing to check for.

Bob

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