What a mess!!

[_Dee_Dee_Martin_]

I recently switched from OS9 to Panther and upgraded to Adobe CS Premier. I would like to use OTFs, but it's really becoming a pain!!

I've been using Illustrator, InDesign, Freehand, Photoshop Pagemaker, FileMaker etc. for 15 years and all my old files were done with Postscript fonts. When I open any of these old files, the PS fonts (no loger loaded in Extensis Suitcase) are not recognized and all text blocks in a document must be changed to OTF versions. This is a pain and often very time consuming in large projects using many fonts.

Some programs, such as InDesign, offer a font substitution dialog box to select the new OTF fonts as substitutions, but Illustrator, for example, does not. I have a huge map project done in Illustrator that I need to revise for four color process output. I can see that this will be almost a three day job, just changing the fonts out. There's got to be a better way. I don't want to keep duplicate PS and OTF fonts (with all the problems that would entail) on my hard drive.

I know I could deactivate the OTFs and install the PS versions in Suitcase, but with years and years of customer files, I'd never get the PS files off my hard drive.

I've also noted that things may look great on the screen using OTFs, but hard copy to a PostScript printer produces errors in many of the special characters such as bullet, TM, copyright, symbols etc. This makes repeat jobs a pain, when they fully proofed for earlier runs, but now require close scrutiny because of these errors.

For the present, I'm going back to PS fonts because I just don't have time to "deal" with the font issues of OTFs. I _love_ the optical kerning and neat swashes, but I'll just have to do without until someone can tell me how to make the transition easier and less painful.

dee dee

[_Christoph_Herold_]

I haven't all those problems. Nevertheless, we recently discussed naming issues, and that's where I fully agree with you (even if you don't mention them explicitely).
There used to be font substitution, and, as far as I remember, even a possibility to manually edit substitution tables in both ATM and Acrobat reader. I know this always was a problem under Win-NT based systems (as my two XP variants). But I don't even find a substitution file any more, neither in ATM nor in Adobe reader. And that's indeed a mess. If I understand that OTF fonts bear new names, I really don't understand at all why it shouldn't be possible to automatically substitute e.g. Berkeley (T1) by Berkeley STD. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of PDFs around that don't contain embedded fonts. Or the old files one has on his computer or some diskette, ZIP or CD, based on pre-OTF times T1 fonts.
Couldn't it be possible, for instance, to integrate proper font substitution even in Win XP, in order to be able to read, for instance, the "Adobe Type 1 font format" reference manual PDF in Stone (OTF variants) withouth having to re-install the old T1 fonts or see messy TNR instead?

Christoph

[_Dee_Dee_Martin_]

Glad to know I'm not alone, Christopher.

dee dee

[_NHamilton_]

Christoph

You might want to take a look at the OpenType & Type 1 names thread below.

Nigel