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• • May 8, 2014 at 8:17 pm #68353
    Nathan Richards

    Member

    I’m having an issue where InDesign is taking one Font Family (Whitney), and separating out the styles into their own font families.

    In OSX’s Font Book, all my Whitney styles (Book, Light, Medium, Semibold, Bold, etc) are listed under “Whitney.”

    But in InDesign, they are listed as:
    Whitney –> Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic
    Whitney Book —> Regular, Italic.
    Etc.

    So, if I am using “Whitney Book” for a paragraph style, it prevents using a Character Style where I am just applying a “Bold” modifier, because “Whitney Book” doesn’t have a “Bold” style option.

    I’d like InDesign to display the font like OSX Font Book, where all the syles are subsets of “Whitney’, as in “Whitney –> Bold” “Whitney — LightItalic,” and so on.

    Any ideas on why this occurs and how to solve the issue?

    Thanks for any help.

    (Also, I’m not using the “Document Fonts” feature, which I’ve heard can cause font issues. I am using InDesign CC.)

  • May 9, 2014 at 7:47 am #68363
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    I’m on windows but had similar issues, what I think is happening is this.

    Within each font is a ton of metadata with the font name, family, weight,
    opentype names, and alternate names. You can see what I mean here:

    View post on imgur.com

    Sometimes the font creator is a bit careless about how they fill in these blanks.
    If I have Meta Book, and Meta Normal, and Meta Medium… then ideally what I want
    is the family name on all three fonts to say “Meta” and then the rest of the blanks
    describe what flavor of Meta we’re dealing with.

    But some font creators annoyingly put e.g. “Meta-Book” in the book font’s family name,
    then “Meta-Medium” in the medium font’s family name, and so on.
    Then it will appear as two different families within indesign and other apps.

    Your operating system is sometimes smart and figures out that despite the incorrect
    family naming method, these fonts all belong together.
    So in the Font Book, everything looks good.

    Unfortunately, the best fix I’ve found is to actually own a font editing program
    (in my case, FontLab, which is available for Mac) and manually redo all the family
    names so that they all match, in your case you’d want all of them to say Whitney.
    It’s tedious, and probably not realistic if you don’t plan on making fonts
    (fontlab is expensive).

    You might be able to find a cheap or free program to edit this metadata.
    Maybe DTL OTMaster? https://www.fontmaster.nl/english/OTMaster_rdrct.html

    And you’ll have even more options if you use WINE or some other windows emulator
    that can run windows apps on mac.

    • May 9, 2014 at 1:40 pm #68368
      Nathan Richards

      Member

      Thanks for that very helpful and detailed reply.

      It all makes sense now.

      I do have a Windows partition, so I’ll check out the options there.

      It looks like RoboFont for Mac might be a good program for this task. Like FontLab, it’s also expensive, but RoboFont has a 15 day free trial and I can clean up all my affected fonts in that time.

      With the cost of some of these fonts, you’d expect they would come with all this stuff sorted out in the first place. I can’t see the advantage of the way it is now with all the splintered families. Ah well, such is life.

      Thanks again for your help!

  • May 9, 2014 at 2:09 pm #68369
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    cheers, and good luck. If you don’t get them sorted in 15 days then I think Glyphs for mac can do the same thing,
    and would give you an additional 30 days.

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