Extended character in font naming and OSX Word

[Ben Kiel]

All:

Has anyone had any luck getting a font with an extended character (in this case eacute) to work in the latest OSX Word? I can get such a think to work in OSX, Windows, Win Word, etc., but for Mac Word, the correct font shows in the font menu preview, but does not appear when said font is selected. Before I bag this, I wanted to see if anyone else had gotten this to work.

Best,

Ben Kiel

[Miguel Sousa]

Ben,

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. Are you saying that (in Word for Mac 2011?) if a font has an é on its menu name said font will show up in the font menu list but when selected it won’t display on the document?

M.

[Ben Kiel]

Miguel,

Yes, that wasn’t super clear.

In Word for Mac 2011, working on a family that has an accented character in the name causes the font to show up correctly in the Font Menu, preview and all, but when selected for typing in the application, one only has the fallback font.

Name ids 1, 4, and 16 have the accented character, for both Mac and Windows name table entries, along with entry 7.

I am wondering if anyone has a font that is working in Mac Word 2011 that has an accented character for those name table entries so that I know that this can work and thus I’m just missing something in these fonts that needs fixing.

Best,
Ben

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[Miguel Sousa]

I’m not having any luck building a font with the contents of FontMenuNameDB listed below. Makeotfexe is throwing this error:
makeotfexe [FATAL] <MyriadPro-NonASCIImenuName> I can't find a Family name for this font !

I’m going to try using TTX next.

#----------------

[MyriadPro-NonASCIImenuName]
# f=Myriad Pro NôñASCIIménùNäme
f=1,0,0x0,Myriad Pro N\F4\F1ASCIIm\E9n\F9N\E4me
f=3,1,0x409,Myriad Pro N\00F4\00F1ASCIIm\00E9n\00F9N\00E4me
# s=NôñASCIIménùNäme
s=1,0,0x0,N\F4\F1ASCIIm\E9n\F9N\E4me
s=3,1,0x409,N\00F4\00F1ASCIIm\00E9n\00F9N\00E4me

# ô \00F4
# ñ \00F1
# é \00E9
# ù \00F9
# ä \00E4

[Miguel Sousa]

Ben,

I was able to make the changes with TTX, but I’m getting a fallback font in Word for Mac 2011 (Version 14.4.3) as well.

M.

[Ben Kiel]

The way I’m building the FontMenuNameDB is:

[MyriadPro-NonASCIImenuName]
f=Myriad Pro N\00F4\00F1ASCIIm\00E9n\00F9N\00E4me
f=1,Myriad Pro N\F4\F1ASCIIm\8En\F9N\E4me
s=N\00F4\00F1ASCIIm\00E9n\00F9N\00E4me
s=1,N\F4\F1ASCIIm\8En\F9N\E4me
l=Myriad Pro N\00F4\00F1ASCIIm\00E9n\00F9N\00E4me
l=1,Myriad Pro N\F4\F1ASCIIm\8En\F9N\E4me

That should work. I’ve found that you have to provide the l= values even if it’s a case where you normally wouldn’t, or you’ll get an error. Escaped unicode for the normal entries, escaped MacRoman for the 1 entries. At least, that’s how I’m building this and getting what appears to the the correct result when TTX’ed.

Paul van der Laan was kind enough to also confirm that he couldn’t get this to work in Mac Word in the past, so I think this is a lost cause, unfortunately. The other issue I found was with FontExplorer Pro (latest version). It will activate things but not preview the font when there is an extended character.

Best,
Ben

[Thomas Phinney]

We encountered this at Adobe long ago, with similar problems, in Word for Mac a decade ago or more. That's why we dropped accents from Latin characters in menu names for a couple of fonts, during the conversion of the Adobe Type Library to OpenType.

I am sad, but not shocked, to hear that such problems persist today in the most recent version of Word for Mac.

T