Re: FLASH: Re: Fonts (was What hardware should I buy?)

[KJ]

>So is it general consensus that the best idea is to use TrueType fonts for

Flash?


Type 1 and TrueType are often two types of fonts at the same level of

quality. Sometimes they are different. When True Type first came out they

got a bad rap because some were rip offs (literally) of Type 1 fonts. Some

of the bad press was also likely spread by the Type Foundries becasue they

could no longer sell $200 per typeface fonts anymore. Common thought was

Type 1 were good and True Type were bad. This was probably too simplistic an

answer, however. Some TrueType were poorly constructed while others were so

good that they were exact copies of Type 1 fonts TypeCase from Swfte were

not allowed to sell their fonts for some time because of this.


It was also said that you should NEVER mix Type 1 and True Type. At the time

I was working at a Forms Design house and we sent tons of files out for

negs. I often used Type 1 and True Type and sometimes both if needed. Only

fonts I ever had a problem with were Type 1. This was because Foundries

often do what designers do---They look back at their work and think that

what had looked good would look better if they tweaked it a bit. The result

was that a 1988 version of Helvetica and a 1994 version of Helvetica might

be ever so slightly different. The result was that the sometimes 6 point

type I was setting no longer matched the breaks of the previous job I might

be correcting. What made matters worse was that I might have gotten the

original job from an outside vendor who no longer was in business with the

result that instead of stripping in a paragraph I might need to reset the

whole thing. (Banks in particular wanted everything in exactly the spot they

wanted which was sometimes nearly impossible.)


Probably way more than you wanted to know about fonts and typefaces.


Bottom line. I doubt that 1 in 10,000 would tell the difference between Type

1 and TrueType fonts on a web project. What you can tell the difference on

are poorly designed typefaces regardless of the format. So.... for my money

use Truetype whenever possible. They are cheaper and are often designed by

the same foundries and they don't cause the NT problems listed.


That said it is inexcusable IMO for Adobe to not do a better job with fonts

than they do. They bought Fontminder, a good type management tool to put

them out of business. They load fonts for their programs without having some

type of coding to prevent you from unloading essential fonts. Try Acrobat,

Pagemaker and Photoshop and accidentally remove one of their "required"

fonts that they don't list.


and...the NT bug which they know about and haven't fixed is another one.

Couple that with their abandonment of PageMaker owners for InDesign and I

think they are worse than the company that usually gets bashed.


Kevin Jackson

kjacksontriskelian [dot] com

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