Merge font family into one file/menu item

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Bluesman
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Merge font family into one file/menu item

Post by Bluesman »

Hi, as it is today you are depended on how a font family is generated for how it appears in you fontlists in different softwares. Sometimes you see the fontfamily name in the main list and can choose the style in the "styles" list... but mostly you have fonts listed in each weight and sometimes just the plain, italic, bold, bold italic... then the rest...extra bold, condensed, extended etc are in different fontfiles....
Would be nice if you can set order to this... either atomatically generated or manually. Just you can do it...

Saludos
admin
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Re: Merge font family into one file/menu item

Post by admin »

Windows groups fonts by Family name and it allows 4 fonts per family (Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic). So the font designers usually make "Condensed", "Light", etc. a part of family name. For example, "MyFont Condensed" becomes a family name for condensed regular MyFont font. In future versions we can group more than 4 fonts, for example, 8 fonts in under one family name, but if this collection is installed, the fonts will be displayed in font menu of 3rd party application under different families.
Bluesman
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Re: Merge font family into one file/menu item

Post by Bluesman »

Ok, but for example when you use Illustrator or Photoshop you can take the font Minion Pro or Myriad Pro that are installed with Adobe I think. In this font families you get 10 subnames under each family name??
And they get all fonts that belong to each family in the right submenu...
admin
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Re: Merge font family into one file/menu item

Post by admin »

This is possible for Adobe because Myriad Pro and Minion Pro are native Adobe fonts, they KNOW that they can group more than 4 fonts into one logical family, but for the rest of Windows applications this font appears as different families, no more than 4 fonts in one family. If you install two fonts of 3rd party font vendor, "My Font" Regular and "My Font Condensed" Regular, will Illustrator display them in one group named "My Font"? For all programs, including Adobe applications, these fonts will appear as two different fonts: "My Font" and "My Font Condensed".

Good (ideal) application that correctly works with fonts is a Wordpad (it is built in Windows under Accessories group of programs). Wordpad correctly displays font list by the way known to all other Windows applications. It also correctly updates its font list on the fly (when the set of fonts in Windows changes). If you install and activate all font faces of "Open Sans" font, it will appear in Wordpad menu under different family names: "Open Sans", "Open Sans Extrabold", "Open Sans Light", "Open Sans Semibold". And Wordpad does not know that all these fonts can be grouped into one family, because there is no support for grouping more than 4 fonts into one family in Windows. But in theory, "the developers of Wordpad" can add SPECIAL support to THIS font ("Open Sans") and display it under one family "Open Sans", but for formatting of a text paragraph on a page they still will need to specify different family names ("Open Sans" fro regular font and "Open Sans Light" for light font). This limitation is built in Windows API. Programs use so called LOGFONT structure to request fonts, and selection of fonts is depending on the logic - how Windows "understands" the data specified by developer of the application in this data structure.
This structure has fields: "family", "bold or not bold", "italic or not italic" and "weight" (and some other fields). Also these fields are a "recommendation" (a desired request) to Windows. This structure "understands" 4 types of fonts - Family + regular/bold/italic but the weight field is not used for grouping fonts with different weight into one family.
Bluesman
Posts: 54
Joined: Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:46 pm
Location: Quito, Ecuador
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Re: Merge font family into one file/menu item

Post by Bluesman »

Thanks for clearifying that. Not a big deal, but in my WebDesign software it would make the font menu more handible. But if "FE" gets more safe with the webfonts activation (ttf) I can have all handling from there.
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