A fount of ideas for font management

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 15, 1996 by Robert Sugar

Ideally, your creative team should deal with creative problems. Unfortunately, the more experimental the design, the more problematic the imaging process can get.

After more than a decade of desktop publishing, font management remains a major obstacle. The creaky system of dual screen and printer fonts that makes up the PostScript page-description language, and the proliferation of font vendors, shareware fonts and alternative font formats, have made it difficult to deal with fonts.

What's the best way to avoid font mistakes now? The cleanest approach would be a closed-loop system in which fonts are monitored and made available by a central authority. For organizations with in-house pre-press, this is a possibility. Still, unusual fonts can creep in with advertiser insertions, computer-illustration submissions and text with special characters.

Using an outside vendor for prepress gives you even less control over what happens between laserproof and film. But there are ways to ensure that what you see is really what you get.

Make a PostScript file. If you use a lot of fonts, and everything works fine on your laserprinter, making a PostScript file will embed any fonts used, and the service provider will have no font-conflict issues. PostScript documents are not editable, so you must send original files, and you need to have those fonts.

Be diligent about collecting fonts. Magpie, an extension to QuarkXPress, collects all your screen and printer fonts with a document's images. Font vendors consider this an illegal use of their software, but most service bureaus call it business as usual. Having both your screen and printer fonts available for imagesetting is the only practical way to ensure the correct result. Even without Magpie, Quark prints a report of the necessary fonts. (PageMaker has a similar utility called Checklist.)

Use a "preflight" utility. Both FlightCheck from Markzware and Download Mechanic 1.7 from Acquired Knowledge Inc. do the same thing--they imitate the rasterization routines of various imagesetters, allowing you to see how your document will run. You can avoid missing fonts and images, as well as trapping and overprinting mistakes. Another utility, Transverter Pro, rasterizes images on the screen, allowing you to see if your document contains flaws.

Organize the fonts in your shop. These days, it's not unusual to have thousands of typefaces from multiple vendors. Our studio has over 6,000 typefaces available, and we keep over 1,200 online. It goes without saying that you should combine fonts into larger units. But even if you load families together, you'll still have hundreds of folders.

Suitcase 3.0 and Master Juggler allow you to control fonts by letting you move them out of your System folder and open and close them mid-program. You can throw away all but one size of screen font, which really saves space on a hard disk, and you can combine fonts together from the same vendor. The FONDler does this automatically, cutting font folders down to a manageable 20 or so and making it easy to collect fonts manually if you have to send them out with a job.

Use a network solution. Finally, the best way to manage fonts is to ensure that everyone uses the same ones. The easiest way to do that--if your organization is connected with an Appleshare server--is to put all the fonts on a read-only server volume. Using Master Juggler or Suitcase, your whole department can easily share fonts across the network. This is not only easier to administer, but is probably more in compliance with the law than having copies of fonts on everyone's machine. It also reduces the space taken up by fonts on local hard drives.

It may take programs a little longer to boot, but there is no noticeable slowdown in performance once the program is working. However, if your server crashes a lot (which it shouldn't!) everyone loses their fonts when it goes down. Still, in most environments, networking your fonts is the ideal solution for a shop full of creative designers who don't want to be limited to a few fonts or waste time opening and closing suitcases as they work their design magic.

Managing your fonts is simple: Know your fonts, know where they come from, and standardize operations wherever you can. Be respectful of the rights of font vendors, but make sure you're covered when your files go out the door for further processing. You are responsible for your document resources, and if you don't take care, pages won't print correctly and deadlines will be missed.