Font Fatigue: The Font Twilight Zone
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A Surreal-world example for the uninitiated, or as Rod Serling might say, “Submitted for your approval”:
Jim runs a print shop that specializes in newsletters. A variety of client page layout files (from QuarkXPress, InDesign, even Microsoft Word) come in every day. One day a client file arrives that uses Times and Helvetica. Pretty standard stuff for newsletter neophytes. Jim opens the file in the application (let’s say it’s InDesign, a native Mac OS X application) and does the standard preflight checks for missing graphics and missing fonts.
Jim’s preflight check says the file is OK. Both Times and Helvetica are found by InDesign (since they’re supplied with Mac OS X, and active in /System/Library/Fonts). Jim proceeds to output the file to his digital platesetter and print 5,000 copies of the newsletter.
But what he didn’t discover is that the client used older Adobe PostScript versions of Times and Helvetica in her design, while Jim used a TrueType version (the dfont files in Mac OS X are essentially TrueType). Because of this, the kerning and letterspacing were just a bit different, so that the last line on the second page got cut off. But this last line contained the crucial sentence: “Warning: do not attempt this at home.”
To make a long story short, one of the readers of the newsletter did attempt this at home, and his son suffered great and permanent psychological damage as a result. That boy grew up to be a bus driver, who one day went berserk and ran into a crowd of people, killing Jim in the process. (Fade up Twilight Zone theme).
In Science, the preflight failure described above would be called a “false positive.” In the more mundane world of graphic arts, it’s just called “a really bad thing.” Make sure it doesn’t happen to you by carefully keeping track of which versions of fonts are really active in Mac OS X.
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