Can you reproduce this Windows bug with newer Windows than XP?

[Daniela Duerbeck]

Hi!

I found a strange bug in Windows XP:
When I have a bunch of fonts that have large names that differ just in
postions more than 16 at doubleclick just the first installed font with
this name is shown, not the font I doubleclicked.

I created three demo fonts (with demoversions of fontlab tools) to
reproduce this behaviour:
www.deltadelta.de/nmz/TestFontBugDemoFont1.zip

When you unzip this file and doubleclick each font, everything works
fine, but when you install e.g. the first font, at doubleclick of the
others just the installed font is shown.

After deinstalling of the first font eveything is again fine.

Now I would like to know whether this bug also exists in newer versions
of Windows, e.g. Vista or Windows 7.

Because then I could report it to Microsoft, since they will not make
bugfixes for XP, I fear.

Thanks a lot in advance,
Dani

[TaliesinSoft]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:22:27 -0600, Daniela Duerbeck wrote (in article
<7nbcamF...@mid.uni-berlin.de>):

Perhaps not much help but the three fonts displayed as different when
installed and viewed via Font Book under Mac OS X 10.6.2.

(But, hey, do you expect otherwise from a Mac?)

--
James Leo Ryan --- Austin, Texas --- talies...@me.com

[Thane]

"Daniela Duerbeck" <daniela....@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:7nbcamF...@mid.uni-berlin.de...

I use XP and have no problems with long font names in commercial fonts.
This may not be a Windows problem. It may be in the name tables of your
fonts. For example, my font manager, which has no problems with very long
font names (e.g. GillSansDisplayMTPro-BdCn, GillSansDisplayMTPro-Bold,
GillSansDisplayMTPro-ExBd), sees but one font to install in your examples:
TestFontBugDemo-Regular.

Thane

[Allan Murray]

Hi Dani,

It is not a bug - just the quirky way that Windows deals with font names.

The problem is that all your demo fonts have the same family name -
TestFontBugDemoFont.

With Windows, for the font-family "TestFontBugDemoFont", you can only really
have these full-names:
TestFontBugDemoFont
TestFontBugDemoFont Bold
TestFontBugDemoFont Italic
TestFontBugDemoFont Bold Italic
Otherwise you will not be able to access all the fonts (unless you are using
Typygraphically smart software like InDesign etc).

If you want them to appear as seperate fonts then you need to give them
different family names. Only unique family names are listed in the font
selection menu of programs like MS Word etc.

See http://cr8.netfirms.com/article001.html and various other articles on
the internet about font naming.

Cheers,
Allan

"Daniela Duerbeck" <daniela....@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:7nbcamF...@mid.uni-berlin.de...

[Andreas Prilop]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2009, Allan Murray wrote:

> With Windows, for the font-family "TestFontBugDemoFont", you can only really
> have these full-names:
> TestFontBugDemoFont
> TestFontBugDemoFont Bold
> TestFontBugDemoFont Italic
> TestFontBugDemoFont Bold Italic

Since Windows 2000 and ΟpenΤype, you can have more than 4 styles:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm

--
Top-posting.
What’s the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Ron Parker]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:29:49 +0100, Andreas Prilop wrote:
> Since�Windows�2000�and�?pen?ype,�you�can�have�more�than�4�styles:
> http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm

That page says this about name ID 1:

Font Family name. Up to four fonts can share the Font Family name,
forming a font style linking group (regular, italic, bold, bold italic -
as defined by OS/2.fsSelection bit settings).

Also, relevant to the original claim that long font names expose a bug in
Windows, the MSDN documentation for the Win32 CreateFont API says this:

lpszFace [in]
A pointer to a null-terminated string that specifies the typeface name
of the font. The length of this string must not exceed 32 characters,
including the terminating null character.

So while I wouldn't necessarily call it a bug, a length limit on family
names in Windows does seem to exist. Why it exists - or whether Windows
even continues to actually enforce this limit in practice - is anybody's
guess.

Finally, and just out of curiosity, is there a reason you use Greek letters
for the O and T in OpenType? Neither Microsoft, who own the trademark, nor
ISO/IEC 14496 seem to spell it that way.

[Andreas Prilop]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Ron Parker wrote:

>> http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm
>
> That page says this about name ID 1:
> Font Family name. Up to four fonts can share the Font Family name,

Scroll down to 16.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:www.microsoft.com/Typography/OTSpec/name.htm+%22Preferred+Family%22

> Finally, and just out of curiosity, is there a reason you use Greek letters
> for the O and T in OpenType?

To uncover misconfigured newsreaders like yours and like Outlook Express
of Allan Murray.

[Ron Parker]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009 18:16:26 +0100, Andreas Prilop wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Ron Parker wrote:

>> Finally, and just out of curiosity, is there a reason you use Greek letters
>> for the O and T in OpenType?
>
> To uncover misconfigured newsreaders like yours and like Outlook Express
> of Allan Murray.

Mine's not misconfigured; it's just not Unicode-aware. Nor is my SSH client.
What would you suggest they display instead of a question mark?

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009, Ron Parker wrote:

> User-Agent: slrn/0.9.8.1 (Linux)

>
> Mine's not misconfigured; it's just not Unicode-aware.

Sorry, but I have no experience with slrn. You might ask in
<news:news.software.readers>

> Nor is my SSH client.

I can't believe this. What are you locale settings?
You should have something like
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

--
I used to believe in reincarnation in a former life.