Occasionally you can find fonts drawing attention by a diacritic in the name, like
Jazmín or
Byŏm.
While I can see some benefits in this, like promotional boost, the quality of being edgy, there are some obstacles (FontLab and FontForge are not 100% compatible with generating fonts with such names, so you might end up tinkering with the name tables manually). Can you point any other drawbacks, like user confusion, or OS/app incompatibility or difficulty finding the font by typing etc.?
I don't know if the examples I mentioned actually go all the way with the accent accent, or perhaps just in the branding. Maybe the actual font files have the accent stripped to prevent any problems? But wouldn’t promoting one name and using another actually cause more problems?
Comments
- Internal things that are rarely exposed to users, notably the PostScript font name. The PS font name MUST use ASCII only, no diacritics. You can use the proper name in things like copyright and trademark notices and other long text fields, however.
- the file name. I would be inclined to stick to ASCII. I don't think this would be a problem to users, though you might disagree.
- the various kinds of menu names. This is what users normally see. Using diacritics here may break compatibility with some ancient operating systems and/or apps. The nature of this breakage will likely vary. The real question is ... just how old and which ones? My knowledge here is pretty thoroughly out of date. It would be helpful to get feedback from folks using this recently.
Adobe has one of these fonts, btw. Orgánica by Gabriel Martinez Meave.
I hope you have reported the FontLab bug you mention—that ought to be fixed. Although of course you can set the PS name manually, so this is not a large hurdle for a user to work around. (I left FontLab six months ago, so not my thing any more.)
I believe it has been fixed in some later FL7 build.
My understanding is that you may use non-ASCII characters in your font names (except PS Name), but in case of Macintosh platform you probably will be limited to characters in the MacOS Roman codepage.
Of course, [name] table structure allows to specify many alternative names for different languages, but current UX support for that in FontLab is very limited.