Truetype to Opentype conversion

[barup]

Hi Forum

I hope this is the right forum, but here goes.
I receive documents from different sources, mainly word document using TT font, all of the documents contain different kinds of extended glyphs like cyrillic chars.

I want all documents to use an Opentype font instead (Helvetica Neue LT Pro), but it seems that selecting all text and change font will fail, likely because mapping of the glyphs are different from TT to Opentype.

So is there a workaround or am I missing the obvious?

Kind regards
Lars

[_Adam_Twardoch_]

The obvious may be that Helvetica Neue LT Pro does not include Cyrillic glyphs at all. First of all, note that there are two OpenType formats: OpenType PS and OpenType TT. More about it at http://www.myfonts.com/info/opentype-flavors-ps-tt/

There are several OpenType versions of Helvetica around:

1. "Helvetica Linotype" in OpenType TT format, developed at Linotype. Only 4 basic weights (Roman, Oblique, Bold, Bold Oblique) but a huge character set: a large set of Western and Central European diacritics, award-winning new designs for Greek and Cyrillic, plus Hebrew and Arabic. Also, well-hinted for the screen and altogether a workhorse for text in office and publishing aplications.

2. "Helvetica Neue LT Pro" in OpenType PS format, developed at Linotype. A family with many styles but the character sets only cover Latin-based diacritics for Western and Central Europe.

3. "Helvetica LT Std" in OpenType PS format, developed at Adobe. A family with less styles than the "Neue" clan. Most styles have only Western European diacritics, but a few also have Cyrillic (but no Central European).

If you already own the Helvetica Neue LT Pro, I recommend also getting Helvetica Linotype from:
http://www.linotype.com/48344/helveticalinotype-family.html

You can combine these two, using Helvetica Linotype for body text and when multilingual texts are necessary, while using Helvetica Neue LT Pro for display purposes and when the additional styles are required.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
- MyFonts.com typographic consultant
- FontLab scripting products and marketing manager
- Linotype font technology consultant

[barup]

Hi Adam

Well I had checked if the font contained cyrillic glyphs and yes it does (it's the Pro font set and we have the entire family of styles) ;-)

If I use the font in Indesign with different keyboard layouts, I have access to both Centrale European and Cyrillic as well as special nordic (like Icelandic) glyphs.

I did an additional test on a pc (winxp pro) and have the same problem as on the mac. Initially the document looks fine with the TT font chosen, but trying to change it to the opentype makes everything unreadable. Note that the standard charset a-z, A-Z will look okay.

regards
Lars

[_Adam_Twardoch_]

I'm quite surprised to hear that Helvetica Neue LT Pro contains Cyrillic glyphs. At least the version I have does not. The Linotype website also does not show any Cyrillic characters in this font:
http://www.linotype.com/36741187/neuehelveticapro55roman-charactermap.html

Note that the Windows Character Map utility cheats when displaying character sets of OpenType PS fonts (it shows Arial glyphs for the glyphs missing from the font.)

Your problem might be also that you're using an old version of Word. Word 2000 and Word XP had a bug in handling non-Western characters in OpenType PS fonts (OpenType TT worked fine). Basically, these characters are not accessible. This bug was fixed in Word 2003.

Adam

[barup]

Hi Adam

You are a life/time saver!!!!

You are right, neuehelvetica doesn't contain cyrillic glyphs, how on earth could I miss that one.
The strange thing is that the keyboard viewer on the mac was happily showing cyrillic chars for neuehelveticapro55roman, but trying to use the font in Indesign would fail.
And you are also right about the winxp issues.

I don't know why I thought that a Pro Opentype font should contain all glyphs, well I'll just have to hunt down one that actually have them all.

regards, and thanks again
Lars

[_Adam_Twardoch_]

At Linotype and Adobe, the "Pro" suffix denotes mutlilingual European support. This means that a font with Western + Central European diacritics will have a "Pro" suffix. The font can also contain Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew etc., but that's not a rule. Fonts that do not contain support for Central European languages are called "Std". Such fonts sometimes contain a huge multitude of swashes, small caps, alternates etc. (like Poetica Std) but all of them only support Western languages. In rare cases, OpenType fonts from the Adobe type library have Western and Cyrillic glyphs but no Central European. In this case, they're also "Std", not "Pro", since they lack CE.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch

[PalakAK]

Hi everybody,

I am new to editing documents. I have a pdf which has Helvetica Neue Roman (True type) fonts, and I have Helvetica Neue LT Pro Roman (Open type) in my PC (Windows). Is there any way to edit that PDF using LT Pro fonts?

What does 55 means in Helvetica Neue 55 Roman?

When I view the properties on any PDF, in the fonts list why it shows Helvetica Neue Roman and not Helvetica Neue 55 Roman?

Thank you.

[Dov Isaacs]

Please do not hijak old threads with new topics. Please start a new thread.

But to answer your question, the fonts are different. Your ability to edit text in PDF via Acrobat depends on whether the original font that was embedded has the "editability" option or whether it is embedded only for "preview and print." If the latter the answer is definitely no. The question then is whether Helvetica Neue LT Pro font also is set for editability embedding. If it isn't (as I believe the case is), you cannot edit in Acrobat.

You would be best off to edit the original document in its native application.

          - Dov

[PalakAK]

@ Dov,

Thank you so much for the reply. I will definitely start a new thread from now if I have any questions.

Sincerely,

Palak