Font Name Change Forced by Vendor?

Rob Barba
Rob Barba Posts: 86
edited March 2022 in Type Business
Okay, here's an odd one for you: I recently had a note from Monotype's Font Platform (MPF) who asked me to shorten the name of one of my fonts, because "it's too long" (name is Semiautonomous Subunit Clade, for the record).  Now, granted, I had run into this issue once before with a font (named The Mysterious Affair) and I ended up just not selling it on MyFonts.  However, this is an update for a font already on MyFonts and now I'm being told the name has to be changed due to length.  Their "help file/resource" is a page on the Glyphs website which explains in detail and I'm fine with that (at least for people who aren't familiar with the rules; I'd like to think that I know that already after all these years.)
The problem is, I've never run into the issues that said page describes.  While I make my fonts in Windows, I do test them against Linux (my wife has a box) and Mac (two friends have that) and I've never run into a problem at all.  When hitting up MPF foundry support, they essentially got back to me with "yup, you need to change the name."
So, if the font has to be changed, and I do not wish to change the name, I'm somewhat in a quandary.  I can't update all my customers who bought the font on MyFonts, and I think it's against the EULA to point them somewhere else (even if I were to give them updated copies from another store so I can update them without issue.)  But moreso this feels like they're trying to force something on me because they didn't do their homework and it would be too much problem to change it now.
Anyone else run into this issue?  Anyone else have suggestions as to what to do?
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Comments

  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 740
    Here is a thread with some details/links about font name length restrictions: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/issues/2179
  • JoyceKetterer
    JoyceKetterer Posts: 812
    @Rob Barba I can only say that we do worry a lot about character count when we name fonts and I agree that your font's name is probably of a length to be worrying from a technical perspective.  That's totally different from the question of how to handle monotype, for which I am totally unqualified to help.  I just avoid monotype.
  • Rob Barba
    Rob Barba Posts: 86
    JoyceKetterer said:
    @Rob Barba I can only say that we do worry a lot about character count when we name fonts and I agree that your font's name is probably of a length to be worrying from a technical perspective.  That's totally different from the question of how to handle monotype, for which I am totally unqualified to help.  I just avoid monotype.
    And I agree; that's why after The Mysterious Affair, I've been generally trying to keep to smaller names myself.  My entire issue is with the fact that the font is already existent and hasn't caused much issues; if it did, why didn't it get caught earlier (I can't imagine I'm the only one with this problem overall) and generally Monotype being Monotype.

    But I guess that last part probably explains everything in the end anyway.  Thanks, regardless.  I probably ultimately just needed to vent on this.

  • JoyceKetterer
    JoyceKetterer Posts: 812
    @""Rob Barba"

    Rob Barba said:
    My entire issue is with the fact that the font is already existent and hasn't caused much issues; if it did, why didn't it get caught earlier...

    Well, in my experience, often even really bad bugs take a while for any user to find.  That is, especially if the use case that triggers the bug is slightly unusual.  When we converted our legacy fonts to Open Type none of them worked in MS programs (the descenders all got cut). You may be aware of this issue, it was a problem that plagued the fonts of that era. At the time, we didn't test MS use cases because we knew they were rare.  It took several years for anyone to report it and a total of eight years before we fixed it.  Over that time, we got fewer than five reports of the issue.

    This isn't my only example.  When we released Halyard there was a weird blue zone problem that only showed up at certain sizes, took about a year for anyone to report it.

    Sorry if I'm undermining your venting.  Monotype is always sloppy and stupid, they should have caught this pre-release.  That said, it is plausible some user did just notice an issue and report it.  


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