I’m probably to cancel my Adobe Creative Suite subscription before my account renews for another year in June. I may cut back to a single application subscription for Indesign. But I don’t plan to do more non-Latin work, so I would like to drop Indesign, too. Those of you who don’t use Indesign for font proofing, what do you use?
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I use mostly the "Tools" ("Filter Text", "Better Adhesion", and "Spacing Grid") and "Latin 2" pages.
Secret tips for the "Filter text" tool:
- When working on text fonts: Set the size to 18px or lower, and you will get nice blocks at all text sizes at the same time.
- When working on display fonts: Set the size to 200 and you get a small cascade, set it to 300px and you get a full cascade (Great for deciding on your font's spacing/fitting).
Perhaps spin-offs of those pages you listed, re-done as standalone html pages residing in the local file system, would be helpful to some.
Gonna check that out.
- rich
One example is the infamous book vs regular issue in InDesign. You simply wouldn’t encounter it elsewhere, and you would not know there was a problem if you did not test it, without a priori knowledge of the issue.
It’s early right now and i’d love feedback!
And in the other corner, we have Thomas, and "You need to license CC, test each font for every way Abobe does things different", presumably, different from the web. (Adobe & commercial font tools, and cc).
So perhaps James' question needs more clarity on for what he is testing, but also perhaps Adobe needs to answer how long it intends to do things on its own, different from the web?;)
But as Khaled says, that's also the point. Since they are part of the game you need to embrace them, and make you font somewhat immune to the rounding errors. (in the same way other optimizations are done to other use cases: inktraps, increased contrast, opened counters, etc).
I try to make all my advance widths even numbers to minimize those. Also printing on paper, where I will make the final decisions. What else you can do? Anyone know other tricks?
Also when kerning, sometimes I prefer my pairs to be multiples of 4, instead of multiples of 5.
Maybe its just and OCD thing....
That's the truth right there.
Absolutely. the question James asked is if you don't use Indesign, what do you use for font testing? So, I think it's prudent to ask "for what are you testing"? or at least
"Test what?" Or maybe just grin and grunt, "You Test?". In a general case, if the answer is "everything", either in the context of testing everywhere the font could be used, or every way the font should be used according to its purpose and recommendations, or both, then CC cannot be avoided.
And also, don't get me wrong, the difference between your description of adobe's handling of Regular, and the web's are both entirely sane to me. In one handling, an engineering group decided to make a mapping between style names and parametric values happen in an environment with relatively static fonts, and then all developers had to, except for the magic list you mention, develop to that. And on the web, I dunno how it got that way, too much typographic disembowlment to have desire to remember, but it's about the same, except that the fonts are dynamic and not every client needs a magic list, but they can each make their own mapping of style name to their parametric desires if they so wish, and they can do so across font families.
That's not a recommendation for James, or anyone else to make sure and test the three fonts in their font family that could end up as regular, with every other other bold it could end up with on the web. But I hope it illustrates the need to say what you do want to test.