Practice preventive font management

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 15, 2001

It's an art director's biggest and perhaps most frequent frustration: All the editorial pages have been shipped to the prepress house with only minutes to spare before final deadline when suddenly the vendor calls, complaining of missing fonts. "Learning proper font management is a great way for a publication designer to save time and minimize headaches," says Greg Paul, partner at editorial and design firm Brady & Paul Communications.

Although "font management" sounds complex to some designers, he says, it's really quite easy. Try using any of today's rather competitively priced font management software packages, he suggests. Programs allow designers to build font folders and menu sets for a publication, and then keep only specific fonts open for use. (Examples, says Paul, are Adobe Type Manager [ATM] Deluxe and Adobe Type Reunion Deluxe.) In addition, Paul says, when preparing for final output, an art director can optiondrag an ATM job folder to a zip or jazz disk and it will automatically copy all necessar y fonts to the disk- which, in turn, eliminates the missing font issue. Adds Paul: "In general, the computer is quicker, chances of font conflicts and crashes from corrupted screen fonts are greatly diminished, and collectively a designer will save huge amounts of time previously wasted scrolling through long menus of unneeded fonts."