Re: [libreoffice-users] Font names

On 03/06/2011 11:18 AM, Zak McKracken wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm using a font with more than two "fatness" degrees, namely "light", 
> "roman" and "bold". More precisely: Frutiger. For each of these modes, 
> there's a normal and an italic variant, giving six varieties, instead 
> of the usual four (normal, italic, bold, bold italic)
>
>
> Now in earlier versions of OOo, that used to result in several 
> apparent fonts (named "frutiger 45 light" and "frutiger 55 roman") in 
> the font list, one being the light, the other the roman version, which 
> includes the bold look (no idea what the boldified "light" variant is 
> equal to).
>
> With OOo 3.2, that changed, and I only saw one single "Frutiger" font, 
> with all the other six options as variants of this one. Which is way 
> more practical, I think.
>
> But since I've switched to LO 3.3.1, the old behaviour is kind of back 
> again: One font named "Frutiger 45 light" which contains the original 
> light and bold options, and one named "Frutiger 55 Roman" with a 
> non-specified bold option.
> All my templates are using the unified font, and I can't be quite sure 
> whether it's being applied correctly, For example with the OOo 3.2 
> behaviour, applying a "bold" modifier via template would always use 
> the "66 Bold" style, regardless of wether the original font was light 
> or Roman, now there are two different (I checked it, they are 
> different) "bold" styles.
>
> Is there a way to bring the old behaviour back? This is probably not a 
> frequent problem, but it can mess up my layout pretty bad :(
>
> Zak
What I know about fonts and the way it SHOULD be displayed in a menu is 
this:
Every font file name should be listed in the "window" showing the font 
name.  If you have Frutiger 45 Light and Frutiger 55 Roman as font names 
in your font folder [Windows or Linux], then each font should be 
displayed separately, not grouped together under one name Frutiger.  I 
know that could sounds wrong.  If you have Arial "plain", Italic, Bold, 
Bold Italic, etc., you get one listing for Arial and you can make use of 
all those styles.  But you are using Frutiger 45 and 55 which are two 
different fonts.  I have Caslon 224 and Caslon 540.  These are two 
different fonts.  The "45" and "55" are telling you that they are 
different fonts, and they should be listed separately.  Now you have add 
a Font Weight to the font description such as Light and Roman.  It just 
means those fonts are the Light and Roman version of "45" and "55".

For the Caslon font[s], I have the font name with the following added; 
2, 3, 5, 12, 30, 42, 224, 335, 540, Antique, Bush, Old Face, Open Face, 
Book, Classico, Plain, Roman, Thin, Normal, Plain, Italic,  Bold, Heavy, 
Semi-bold, Regular, Medium.  So if I have a Caslon font called "Caslon 
224 Book" with several styles, like italic, bold, bold-italic, etc., I 
expect it to be listed differently in the Font Menu than "Caslon 42" and 
its styles.  The good thing about LibreOffice's treatment of fonts is 
that it can make a font be Italic and Bold even if there is not Italic 
and Bold font files to cover those styles.  Most packages will show a 
Bold, Italic, and Underline option.  But I rarely see a package that 
will have Heavy, Semi-Bold, Medium, Light, and such font weights.  
Therefore those need to be listed as different fonts, in most cases.

Why an software did it correctly, then it did not, then it went back to 
the correct way, I do not know what was going on.  But You SHOULD see 
Frutiger 45 and a different entry in the list than Frutiger 55.

I hope I did not confuse you completely.  Dealing with some designer's 
ideas of creating 25 version of the same font that look 95% the same, 
gives me headaches.  I deal with a font project sorting out over 100,000 
fonts where too many of the serif fonts looked like all the other serif 
fonts and if you overlap them, you get almost the same positions of the 
lines.


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