Merging font families into one

[Harald Brandt]

I have in vain tried to map the News Gothic families into one
by editing the maker.ini file. FM version 7, the OS is XP.

I have the following fonts in Windows names:
1. A font family 'NewsGoth BT' in the 4 usual styles
2. A font family 'NewsGoth Dm BT Demi' in 2 styles (the regular and Italic)
3. A font family 'NewsGoth Lt BT Light' in 2 styles (the regular and Italic)

How do I map them into one family, such that, for instance, the Light version gets mapped to 'NewsGoth BT' with weight 'Light' rather than being listed as a separate font?

I have tried all kinds of variants, including:
NewsGoth Lt BT Light=NewsGoth BT, *, Light, Regular

I never get it to work. Isn't the section in the maker.ini file called '[WindowsToFrameFontAliases]' made for this particular purpose?

Are there any guides somewhere which details how to achieve it?

Regards,
/Harald

[Arnis Gubins]

Harald,

The limitation is the operating system. Due to Microsoft's infinite
wisdom (not), they deemed that a font family can only have four
weights. FM is just working within that limitation.

[Joel Benson]

Arnis --

This has aroused my curiousity. On the Mac side, there is no way to keep the Format -> Font menu from listing all the variations of a typeface separately, but the Font menu in the Character Designer correctly lists them as variants of a single typeface.

For example, we have roman and italic versions of not only Helvetica regular/medium and bold, but also black and light, all in both regular and condensed variations. The font menu lists them separately, but the character designer only lists Helvetica once, with all the variants showing up in the Angle, Weight and Variation menues.

Are you saying there is no way to achieve this in Windows?

[Arnis Gubins]

Joel,

The way the fonts are internally named on a PC keeps them in chunks of
4 variant/weight combos that are displayed as Family names (unless I'm
misunderstanding your question).

I see the same "Families" on the Format > Font list as in the Designer
lists, e.g. HelveticaNeueStd Light, Light Cond, Light Ext, Medium,
Medium Cn, etc. If I follow this correctly, you'd expect to see just
the Family name of HelveticaNeueStd and then expect the rest to show
under "Variation" ? The PC side usually doesn't show anything under
the Variation other than Regular or AsIs.

I too would prefer to see the use as you expect it.

[Joel Benson]

I'm not sure how Frame does it on the Mac side, but I am pretty sure these font groupings are not defined at the operating system level (beyond the standard four variations, that is). If that is the case, I don't see why it can't do the same on the PC side.

[Helge Blischke]

Font attribute handling on all flavours of Windows stems from the early days of word processing - the naive user could just select between bold or not bold, italic or not italic, and combinations thereof.

And, at that time, WIndows didn't compete with high end typesetting, so Microsoft decicded the world to be as defined by Windows.

You may improve the situation by editing the WindowsToFrameFontAliases section (did I spell it correctly?) in the maker.ini file. Using this approach you may mimic the behaviour of e.g. the Mac in FrameMaker's character designer, but the basic problem - windows only knows of only four font attrributes, remains.

[Harald Brandt]

Of course I know very well the stupid limitations of the lousy Windows, i.e "chunks of only 4 styles per family". (I prefer Mac of course, but can only use that at home.)

However,I thought that the maker.ini settings under:
'[WindowsToFrameFontAliases]'
were there to be able to map the dumb Windows things into proper families. No one has yet answered me if that is indeed possible, let alone how to do it! Has really no one played with these settings!?
(I have played pretty much with the settings, but have so far not achieved what I wanted.)

What I expected to achieve was of course to get a family name in the Character or Paragraph Designer with four weights: Regular, Light, Demi, Bold.

(By that method it would e.g be easy to apply the character format Bold to any word, since the family doesn't need to be changed. Since I am making templates for other people, it would be much easier for them to understand - otherwise they are very likely to end up with e.g a bolded version of the light font family! - something that must never occur!)

[Helge Blischke]

To give you an example, here is what we use e.g. in case ov the Avenir font family in the WindowsToFrameAliases section:

Avenir Black, *, Bold=Avenir, *, Black, Regular
Avenir Black, Italic, Bold=Avenir, Oblique, Black, Regular
Avenir Book, *, *=Avenir, *, Book, Regular
Avenir Book, Italic, *=Avenir, Oblique, Book, Regular
Avenir Heavy, *, Bold=Avenir, *, Heavy, Regular
Avenir Heavy, Italic, Bold=Avenir, Oblique, Heavy, Regular
Avenir Light, *, *=Avenir, *, Light, Regular
Avenir Light, Italic, *=Avenir, Oblique, Light, Regular
Avenir Medium, *, Bold=Avenir, *, Medium, Regular
Avenir Medium, Italic, Bold=Avenir, Oblique, Medium, Regular
Avenir, *, *=Avenir, *, *, Regular

Itlooks complicated, and indeed is, but we use a sophisticated automated system to create these aliases and insert/delete them into/from the maker.ini depending on which fonts are activated by ATM.

[Harald Brandt]

Ok, I found out what the "secret" is....

First, I erronously took the Windows name as it appeared in Windows Explorer, but eg the font shown as "NewsGoth Lt BT Light" in Windows Explorer should actually be entered as only "NewsGoth Lt BT" in the settings. This was it! Same thing for Demi of course. So at last, I have found the minimal settings in the .ini file that does the correct mapping.

/Harald