Managing Your Fonts

One of the blessings and curses of personal computers is the number and variety of fonts available to users. In the pre-desktop publishing days, fonts were expensive and a publisher was limited to the selection their typesetting service, ad agency or print house had available to them. Even in the early days of personal computers and desktop publishing, obtaining a large font library was an expensive proposition. Originally, Adobe kept the Type 1 font format closed. Type 1 fonts had to be purchased from Adobe or an Adobe-licensed manufacturer. This situation prompted Apple Computer and Microsoft to collaborate on the TrueType font format. The result of this was Adobe's opening of the Type 1 format to everyone. These developments, and MacroMedia's release of Fontographer resulted in a virtual explosion of new and inexpensive fonts. Today, one can amass a huge collection of fonts for little to no investment.

It's a fairly safe generalization to state that most publishers today own an extensive font library, and are faced with managing those fonts on their own computer or in their workgroup. They are also responsible with getting all the fonts used in a publication to the printer when the time comes. Our experience shows this is still quite a challenge for a lot of users. We want to present some solutions on this page. We start with some info managing your own computers fonts and then cover collecting fonts to send to the printer.

Managing Fonts on Your Computer

Both Mac OS and MS Windows provide a method for installing and storing fonts and making them available to applications. For the typical user this is adequate for their font usage needs. Many designers and layout artists however, have a large number of fonts and their computer operating system's method of implementing fonts is not ideal for a couple of reasons.

The amount of RAM installed in your computer greatly affects its performance. How responsive your system is and the number of programs you can run simultaneously are directly related to the machine's available RAM. Every font that is installed on your computer is loaded into memory (RAM) when you start up the computer. Each individual font takes a certain amount of memory, which means that memory is no longer available to other applications. Because of this, running a huge number of fonts can result in a significant performance hit. Things will run slower, and your system will be less responsive.

The other problem with running a large amount of installed fonts is the huge list of fonts that will show up in your applications' font menus. Locating that one font you want from a scrolling list of several hundred fonts is not very efficient, even if they are alphabetized.

Of course, we're not going to tell you this bad news without also pointing you to a solution. The simplest solution is font management software. Font management software overrides your computer system's built-in font installation/management. Typically it allows you to store fonts on your computer wherever you want, and have them organized however you want. Rather than having your fonts stored by the operating system in a single system fonts folder, you can make a fonts folder/directory anyplace on your hard drive you want and have any number of subfolders/directories inside that. You can then create font sets containing any number of fonts you want and turn them on and off as needed. This allows you to have only the fonts you need at any particular time loaded into the operating system.

Probably the two most well-known font management utilities are Adobe ATM Deluxe (available here) and Extensis Suitcase (available here). Both of these products are available for the Macintosh and Windows platforms, although Adobe has indicated they don't intend on updating ATM Deluxe to work with Mac OS X. While each product has some features the other doesn't, their core funtionality is the same, i.e. they are both used to create font sets which can be activated and inactivated as needed. In addition to these two programs, there are several other font management programs for both platforms. The Mac platform probably has more commercial font management software while there are more shareware font managers written for Windows.

In addition to making it easy to manage font sets on individual computers, Extensis makes Suitcase Server, a font management solution for workgroups. With Suitcase Server, you can control and synchronize the fonts being used by an entire workgroup, ensuring that all fonts used in a project are available to all team members who may need to work on that job.

Besides the above mentioned products there are many more commercial and shareware products which have similar functionality. Another popular commercial font manager available for both Macintosh and Windows is DiamondSoft's Font Reserve. In addition to single-user versions, they also make a font server solution similar to Extensis' Suitcase Server product. To check out other options do a Google search for font managers or font utilities.

Collecting Fonts

One of the biggest problems designers and publishers have when sending files to a printer or service bureau is collecting all the fonts that are used in the job, including any needed to correctly print EPS graphics. As computers and software have evolved, this has become easier; there are now affordable software solutions to automate this task and, in fact, the current versions of the leading page layout programs will do this for you.

If you are using an older layout program and have no third-party software which will collect the fonts used in a job, then the best way to keep track of the fonts in a job is to record them as they are incorporated into the layout. Ideally, you would create a job fonts folder and place a copy of each font into that folder when it is first used in the layout. Then, when you are ready to send the job out for printing, you would just need to copy that folder to your CD or Zip disk and send it off.

Since version 6, Adobe PageMaker has included the option to include fonts when running the "Save for Service Provider" plugin. This feature is accessed under PageMaker's Utilities-->Plugins menu.

You should run the "Preflight Pub" function in this dialog first. This will check all the linked art and fonts used in the job and make sure they are available on the computer which is running this function. If everything checks out okay, you can hit the package button which will yield the following dialog:

Make sure and check the "Copy Fonts" checkbox and select the "All" button as shown in this screen shot. Provided the Preflight Pub function returned okay's on all fonts and graphics, PageMaker will now copy all the fonts used in the job into the folder/directory you designated in this Collect dialog, along with all the linked graphics.

If you use Adobe InDesign, the Preflight and Package functions are located under the File menu. After you have gotten a successful preflight you are given a screen where you can give contact information and any special instructions for the printer:

After filling this in and hitting the continue button the collect dialog appears:

Once again, make sure the "Copy Fonts" checkbox is selected and InDesign will copy them to your designated folder/directory. (The above screen shots are from version 1.5 of InDesign, not the latest 2.0 version.)

QuarkXpress has a Collect for Output function for collecting up the necessary elements to send to the printer. Unfortunately, prior to version 5, the Collect for Output only made a list of the the fonts used in the job. The user then has to take that list and manually collect the fonts to send to the printer. As you can see from the following screen shot, the formatting of the report doesn't make this job any easier:

If you are using a version of QuarkXpress earlier than 5, you may want to consider getting a preflight program such as FlightCheck Collect! which will collect a jobs's fonts for you (more on these programs later). If you're using QuarkXpress version 5, when you select "Collect for Output" under the File menu, you will be presented with this dialog:

Make sure and both font check boxes are selected (in Windows, there is only one font checkbox). As with PageMaker and InDesign, all your fonts will be collected into your designated folder, provided they are all installed on the machine from which you are running the collection.

The other option available for easily collecting fonts is a preflight/collection program. Markzware and Extensis make the best known programs in this category. Both companies offer extensive preflight software which checks your documents for potential print problems and have job collection options, however, if all you're interested in is collecting the job, they both have less expensive applications which provide fairly minimal preflighting, but whose main function is to collect all the fonts and graphics used in a job. You can check out Extensis' Collect Pro at http://www.extensis.com/collectpro/. The comparable product from Markzware is FlightCheck Collect!, and you can find out more about it at http://www.markzware.com/collect/.

The PDF Option

The other option to be aware of is supplying your job as PDF files. When generating PDF's, the fonts used in a document can be embedded in the PDF, making it uneccessary to supply those fonts with the job. Going the PDF route can eliminate several of the obstacles people face when delivering their job to the printer, including the need to supply the fonts with the job. Of course, PDF's also introduce some new issues that aren't faced when submitting a job as application-native files. While a limited amount of editing can be performed on the text in a PDF file, this is generally only good for fixing simple typo's. If any text in a job needs extensive correction, it needs to be done to the original layout documents and then new PDF's need to be generated from there. There are also some fonts that disallow embedding within a PDF document. Some TrueType fonts have an internal no-embed "flag" set which Acrobat Distiller reads. If the flag is set, then Distiller will not embed the font. Such fonts can still be used, however, those fonts need to be supplied to the printer along with the PDF's so they can be activated when the PDF is processed and printed. We more information on PDF's on our How-To PDF page.

This page last updated on Monday, November 4, 2002