I’m working on a font with non standard weight names. I’ve set the ‘WeightClass’ correctly and they display as expected in Indesign but they appear in the wrong order in the TextEdit Font menu .
Anyone knows wich value uses TextEdit to define the order on its Font Menu?
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Do you know which value uses MS Word to define the order on its Font Menu?
The order of the weights is a little off (Regular at the top), but they are at least paired with the italics. In some cases, Thin gets put at the bottom, but otherwise the sorting makes sense.
I once tried, unsuccessfully, to troubleshoot the Benton Sans family for Font Bureau several years ago. With the OT expansion, the fonts were reorganized with width attribute as part of familyName and styleNames normalized to just weight designation (original versions had styles like BentonSans-RegularCondensed). But still, Word would have problems getting all styles merged and grouped in some semblance of order.
To make matters worse, usually one or two random styles would be missing from the menu. And to make it all more confusing, quitting the app and clearing caches to cause Word to rebuild the menu would result in previously missing styles showing up and new styles going missing.
I seem to recall that it behaved better when only a modest subset of all weights was installed, but it couldn’t handle all sixteen at once. (I don’t remember where the cut-off was.)
We never got a satisfactory answer from Microsoft about what name fields were being used to build their menus and in what way.
I think in the end we set the name fields and OS/2 weight fields according to spec as best we knew how and let Support know that Word was inscrutable. I believe we kept a set of completely unmerged fonts with only italic linking for Customer Support to be able to supply to customers who complained about Word. I don’t know how often they needed to provide those.
Is it possible the sorting depends on the order of the actual file installations of the styles?
Adobe InDesign, for example, sorts at:
1. width (Condensed, Regular, Expanded)
2. weight (Light, Regular, Bold, Black)
3. slant (Regular, Italic/Oblique/Slanted)
but one can argue for other arrangements as well.
(Whatever sorting algorithm InDesign uses, it fails on the 51 styles of Helvetica Neue LT Pro that I have. Although this could be due to malformed meta-information.)
As I see it, "large" font families have three major axes: width, weight, and slant. Displaying them in a one-dimensional list forces one to decide on which axis to sort first. There is something in Frutiger's two-dimensional system – if only it were easy to program as a font menu!
(image courtesy of FontShop (https://www.fontshop.com/content/adrian-frutiger-1928-2015))
Better: allow the user to re-order.
I manage to the alphabet in the correct order most of the time, I think I can handle style ordering. I don't think designers have much spare time for manually rearranging all the styles of their typefaces but who am I to stop them?
Goal A: style appear in a specified order
Goal B, an interface that lets the user manually override a typeface's specified order and save that customer spe....wait...do people really want to do that?
If styles appeared in your app's menu in the order specified by the type designer, would you like to:
A: change the style order in the application menu
B: delete/hide styles in the application menu
Obviously, you can easily delete/hide styles from your OS font menu but what about from every application's font menu.
https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/naming