dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
It used to be that it was easy to spot a missing font. Instead of, say, a nice elegant Adobe Garamond, you’d see stark, typewriter-like Courier, all spaced out and jammed together in some weird semblance of the spacing that Adobe Garamond would have used. This kind of thing stands out like a sore thumb, onscreen or in a printed proof—but only if you take the trouble to look.
But it’s not just Courier anymore: These days, if you specify a font in a digital file, you might end up with a substitute that does its best to mimic the font you wanted. If you don’t keep a close eye on things, you may not get the effect you wanted.
Font Swap
Font substitution happens when the file that’s been created calls for a font that’s not on the system on which it’s being used. If it can’t find the font you specified, the system will try to find one that comes as close as possible to the original. What shows up depends on how your system is set up, and on what you’ve told it (or not told it) to do.
There are two situations in which font substitution generally occurs. It happens when you’re missing one of the two files that make up a PostScript Type 1 font. For example, you may have the screen font but not its associated printer font. You need both files when you’re using PostScript Type 1 fonts, as most graphic designers do. (TrueType fonts come in one file, not two; so do new OpenType fonts, and I’ve seen “single-file” PostScript fonts occasionally.) But font substitution can also happen when you try to print a file from a different system than the one it was created on.
The Courier Effect
With a job sent to a professional printer, you may create a wonderful typographic design that looks great onscreen, but if the printer doesn’t have exactly the same fonts you used, then… errors happen.
I’ve seen a poster in the New York subways that suffered from Courier substitution, which apparently had gone unnoticed: The posters went up in hundreds of subway cars all over the city. You could tell it was a mistake, not an experiment in distressed typography, because another style of the same typeface came out correctly. And just for lagniappe, you could compare English and Spanish versions of the same poster: The Spanish ones were typeset correctly, but the English weren’t.
The correct typeface? Adobe Garamond. My earlier example wasn’t chosen at random.
But at least substituted Courier is obvious. Not so with some of the more elaborate schemes out there.
Typographic Posers
A few years ago Adobe decided to improve the quality of typographic life for office workers. In the business world, documents get passed around all the time, from system to system, and there’s no telling what fonts may be installed on any given computer—or even whether it’s a Mac or a PC. You can always get around this by using only Times and Helvetica, but they’re not the best typefaces for business purposes; they’re just ubiquitous.
What Adobe came up with, using ATM (Adobe Type Manager) and Adobe’s multiple-master font technology, was a couple of protean, generic fonts with no personalities of their own—fonts that could take on the shape and spacing of other fonts. (Well, not always the shape, but definitely the character widths and the spacing.)
The two fonts are called Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif; you can’t specify them in a job, but they’re always there, if you have ATM; and if you let them, they’ll mimic any font that isn’t installed on your system. (Actually, they’ll mimic Adobe fonts, mostly. But that’s a big category, including not just the Adobe Originals but other foundries’ fonts that they sell or used to sell.) This means that the text won’t reflow if you try to view or print a file on a system that doesn’t have your fonts. The result may not look precisely like the typeface that was specified—in fact, it may look quite different, depending on the face—but it’ll fill the same space.
Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif morph themselves into approximations of any sans-serif or serif typeface. If the face they’re imitating has particularly narrow e‘s, then the e in Adobe Sans or Adobe Serif (as appropriate) will also be narrow. The fonts stretch or squeeze themselves to fit the fonts they’re imitating; and they use the multiple-master technology to do that without looking stretched or squeezed. If your typeface is a common-looking sans or serif one, then this kind of mimicry will produce something that’s at least in the same ballpark. To people who don’t pay much attention to fonts, the difference may not be all that apparent.
And there’s the problem. It’s easy to spot a big blotch of Courier on the page where you specified Adobe Garamond; it’s not so easy to spot Adobe Serif’s earnest attempt to imitate the size and spacing of that same Garamond.
Font Mockery
Exactly this kind of font substitution is happening more and more frequently—and it’s getting past the eyes of proofreaders (if there are any left in gainful employment) and into print.
Coincidentally, both of the examples I’ve seen involved our old friend Adobe Garamond—that is, the fonts specified were obviously fonts in the Adobe Garamond type family, but they came out in a pastiche of Adobe Serif.
The first example was a newsletter that came in the mail. At first I found the typeface puzzling; it didn’t look right, somehow. Too awkward, too oddly and peculiarly shaped. I didn’t recognize it, but something about it looked naggingly familiar. What made me suspect font substition was that the capital letters all looked peculiarly larger than the lowercase—all out of proportion.
Then I spotted a few words in clearly identifiable Adobe Garamond Italic, stuck in the middle of a paragraph. That was the clincher. The whole newsletter had been set in Adobe Garamond, but when it was printed, only the italic font was present on the system. The italic came through fine, but the Roman font didn’t; it got replaced by an Adobe Serif imitation.
I laughed ruefully at this, and shook my head wearily. After all, the people who put out newsletters often don’t pay a lot of attention to type. Whoever designed this probably never saw it again, or at least not until it was already in print. Perhaps the next issue would correct the problem.
Galley Slaves
But the second example really started me worrying. It was a book—and not just any old book, but a well-designed hardcover volume from the usually excellent publisher Counterpoint Press. Counterpoint was founded as a sort of continuation-in-spirit of the late, lamented North Point Press, which had been one of the very best small, independent literary publishers in the ’80s. The editorial director was the same, and the book designer was the same—the very talented David Bullen. All the previous books from Counterpoint that I’d seen had been exquisitely designed and carefully typeset; they set a standard for the whole field of publishing.
This time, though, the book I was holding in my hands looked astonishingly like the misprinted newsletter. The interior type was clearly Adobe Serif, and—because I’d just been looking at that newsletter—it was equally clear that the missing font was, again, Adobe Garamond. (What has Adobe Garamond done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that there are lots of different typefaces with “Garamond” in their name; they are not interchangeable, any more than all boys named “Tom” look alike.)
This particular book (I should have bought it as a bad example, but I didn’t) wasn’t designed by David Bullen, but its designer was another careful craftsman who would never have let such a thing get past his eye. What had happened to the production process at this once-superlative publisher, to let this kind of mistake get through the proofreaders and into print? How had such botched books ended up prominently displayed on a bookstore table?
Proof It
If it can happen at a company as dedicated to quality as Counterpoint, it can happen anywhere. The very mimicry that makes Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif so useful in a devil-may-care business environment makes them a dangerous tool in the professional publishing world. You can adjust ATM to disallow this kind of font substitution, but there may be good reasons not to. For example, font substitution can actually be useful during the publishing process when the focus of the proofreading cycle is to check content without being distracted by design.(Aha! Maybe I’ve just isolated how this happened.)
I’m afraid it comes down to that old admonition: eternal vigilance. You really do have to follow the job from start to finish, and you have to look very carefully at proofs at every step of the way. If you skip the last step, you may end up with all your work disfigured at the end by a font substitution.
This article was last modified on April 1, 2022
This article was first published on December 1, 2000
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