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Re: Incorporating Fonts
tacit #7851 01/23/10 05:06 AM
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Yikes! I had no idea all that was going on behind the scenes in the font business. I just wanted to use it in my email and it has become impossible except for lots and lots of steps. Not worth it to me. The font is free in the font book on my Mac, but can't I use it because it doesn't show up except maybe in another Mac. Go figure.

Thanks for all the info. Wow!

Rita


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7852 01/23/10 06:02 AM
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Originally Posted By: plantsower
Thank you for that. I am sure you may be right. It's just a little more work than I wanted to put into it. Just wanted to add a little smilie face or musical note without going through a bunch of steps. It's not that important. Thanks for the info, though.

a) Well... it's not exactly what i'd call "work". smirk

b) You need only do it once (for each "arrangement" desired), and it's done. the image can then be added to any email via drag-n-drop... or, perhaps it could be "installed" in your sig. (i don't use Apple's Mail, so i'm not sure if it offers sigs with graphics).


Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7876 01/23/10 09:44 PM
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Originally Posted By: plantsower
Why would a font creator do that? confused


You also have to look at the fonts like a whole collection of works of art. Fonts are one of the best examples of why you can't always take an image and easily zoom in OR out and still end up with something looking how you want it to.

Each letter of each size/style is hand drawn, and many fonts will do far beyond the normal 120 or so ascii characters, offering extended characters and symbols.

And because fonts zoom very badly, they typically have to draw them again for each font size. If the font shows in the popup with available sizes of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20, 26, 30, and 40 pt, that entire font was hand drawn nine times. The personality of a font really becomes apparent at the larger sizes. Then start more multiplying again when you apply styles. If each of those has merely a bold and italic, now you're talking twenty-seven redraws of over 100 characters. Yikes. I know if I did that much work, I'd want to get paid something for it!

The bugger is you can't always just substitute one font for another and maintain layout, especially at larger sizes. Not many fonts are mono spaced, and as a result, characters like "i" are not as wide as "w". If you don't have the correct font loaded and the system has to substitute something close, a "w" at 30pt could easily be off in width by several pixels. Over the length of a line, that will affect line wraps, and really mess up your copy.

So not only do they put a lot of work into their fonts, but they're very well aware of just how screwed up things can be for you if you don't feel like paying them for it. Even the small print houses we have here in town easily have 3-20 thousand fonts purchased. Some from the OS 8 days. (FontFinagler is very useful for converting format from old style to new so they work on the newer OSs)

That being said, many document formats can package in nonstandard fonts, but those fonts don't usually get installed into the system, they're just used for viewing the document. So if you receive a document using a font you like the looks of, you can't just create a new document and select that font, it won't be listed. So you're probably going to have to buy it anyway even if the font was bundled in.

Also worth noting that when you send a document to say, a laser printer, if you send it as text it will have the same font specification in it, and if the printer lacks the font specified, it will substitute it and the same abovementioned chaos sets in. Higher end apps like Pagemaker and Quark send copies to a printer as raw data (like a picture) to avoid this problem so WYSIWYG, but apps like Word and AppleWorks won't do that. I've ran into many cases of the printout not looking like the preview window. (both in character separations and line wraps)


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
tacit #7880 01/23/10 10:42 PM
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Those are interesting observations and distinctions you are making. Perhaps the original poster's fonts are indeed from a smaller company and that is the source of his problems.

Too bad, but perhaps he could experiment and see if only certain of the specialized fonts are causing issues. Of course, that would be for our collective curiosity and not necessarily resolve his problems. crazy


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
Ira L #7891 01/24/10 04:43 AM
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Hey Ira:

Original poster....are you talking about me? I'm a girl!! smile

Anyway, I assumed that if a font was in my font book, I could use it without problems. According to Virtual1, perhaps not. I think I got TMI but appreciate all the input. Back to plain old emails for me!!

Rita


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
Ira L #7893 01/24/10 05:38 AM
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Originally Posted By: Ira L
Those are interesting observations and distinctions you are making. Perhaps the original poster's fonts are indeed from a smaller company and that is the source of his her problems.

Too bad, but perhaps she could experiment and see if only certain of the specialized fonts are causing issues. Of course, that would be for our collective curiosity and not necessarily resolve his her problems.

Hmm, i just consulted Character Palette for this item: ♫

It seems to be included in several fonts:
Andale Mono
Apple Symbols
Arial
Courier New
Hiragino
Impact
STHeiti
Times New Roman

...but -- in other words -- it's not included in the other fonts.

When we try to force another font to display it, things appear to work... but actually, OSX is doing a substitution under the hood. For those particular eighth notes then, it seems to default to using "Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN" (when we try to apply some other font, such as Lucida Grande).

Interestingly, several of those fonts are something that Windows users should already have. Perhaps there's a flaw in the way the email gets transported (character encoding), or perhaps Windows isn't as thoughtful as OSX, where that font substitution business is concerned. [note that: these forums use Trebuchet MS (or Georgia or Courier) for its fonts... so the fact that we can *see* those eighth notes in Safari must mean that OSX is doing a substitution within this post right now!]

(btw, STHeiti is an attractive font i've never noticed before)

I guess maybe what i'm saying is this: if those are the "musical notes" you were sending plantsower, perhaps applying a specific font within the email... such as Arial or Times New Roman (which a Windows user is likely to have), and making sure you're sending html (not plain-text emails), then maybe (MAYBE) the receiving computer will stand a better chance of properly displaying ♫ .

Last edited by Hal Itosis; 01/24/10 06:00 AM.
Re: Incorporating Fonts
Hal Itosis #7894 01/24/10 05:59 AM
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Look what the music note looked like in my Yahoo email from your message: ♫ I forwarded it to my Mail account and got the same thing. Not sure if that's because it was always the "wrong symbol" in the Yahoo email or not.

I changed all my email fonts (had 4 and didn't know which to change so changed them all) to New Times Roman. I included the musical note and a heart. I enlarged both so my sister can see them. I hope I hear from her tomorrow to see if she could see the notes and hearts. I didn't use the pdf format, just wanted to see if I could send it in regular email this time with the changed fonts.


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7911 01/25/10 04:47 AM
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Originally Posted By: plantsower
Look what the music note looked like in my Yahoo email from your message: ♫ I forwarded it to my Mail account and got the same thing. Not sure if that's because it was always the "wrong symbol" in the Yahoo email or not.

Does "Yahoo email" mean that you're composing and sending your messages in a web browser? Or do you use a normal email client program of some sort? [sorry if this has been mentioned before... just that "Yahoo email" phrase makes me wonder.] Anyway, apparently the character encoding is getting lost (and/or perhaps the font information too). Somewhere there [in a prefs area] should be a place to select various character encodings. Be sure that Unicode (UTF-8) is one, and also Western (ISO-8859-1), and maybe one saying "Windows" as well.

Actually, i'm not fully up-to-snuff on all that, maybe tacit has a better perspective. [i.e., if you show us the "header" from the email you echoed, we can probably glean the encoding info there. Send a short message with nothing other than a few odd chars... and then post the entire *source* view here.]

I would maybe try the Arial font too, before giving up: ♥

Last edited by Hal Itosis; 01/25/10 04:58 AM.
Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7915 01/25/10 05:42 AM
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I use the "Mail" program on my Mac. I have Yahoo, too. On Mail, I looked under prefs for encoding choices and couldn't find any. Rita


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7916 01/25/10 08:33 AM
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> On Mail, I looked under prefs for encoding choices and couldn't find any.

Hi, Rita,

Mail>Menu bar>Message>Text Encoding is what you're looking for...to a degree, anyhow.

I have absolutely no idea how it works, but good luck with it.

Edit: Mine is set at Automatic, and it reverts from Unicode (UTF-8) to Automatic after an e-mail incorporating the Unicode option is sent, if that's of any importance.

I sent e-mails to myself (using the Unicode option) incorporating " ⌥ ⇧ ¢ ⬆ ⬇ ← ↑ ↓ → ©   ⌘ ⋀" and "𝄞 𝄡 𝄢 ♮ ♯ 𝄪 𝄫," and I received them intact.

(The "Automatic" setting seemed to yield the same results, so... confused. )

Hope this helps.

Last edited by artie505; 01/25/10 08:55 AM.

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Re: Incorporating Fonts
artie505 #7923 01/25/10 06:40 PM
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Originally Posted By: artie505
I sent e-mails to myself (using the Unicode option) incorporating " ⌥ ⇧ ¢ ⬆ ⬇ ← ↑ ↓ → ©   ⌘ ⋀" and "𝄞 𝄡 𝄢 ♮ ♯ 𝄪 𝄫," and I received them intact.

Right... step one is to be sure she can send/receive on her own side properly. The second challenge will be bringing her sister's PC into the fray. (admittedly i'm only guessing this will work, but it seems to me that — via html and a *common* font like Arial or TNR — it should be doable).

Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7925 01/25/10 07:00 PM
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Mea culpa! blush I did not read back up the sequence of posts, which would have helped me. crazy


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
Hal Itosis #7927 01/25/10 07:33 PM
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Hi:

I honestly don't understand what I'm supposed to do from the paragraph below. Maybe a little bit more in layman's terms? Thanks. smile

Rita


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
artie505 #7929 01/25/10 07:36 PM
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I did send the notes, etc. to myself when I first started this, and they showed up just fine in my email client. Thanks for the info about where to find the encoding though I'm not sure what I am supposed to do with it. I believe mine is set on automatic, also. Rita


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
Ira L #7930 01/25/10 07:37 PM
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Yes, Ira. It's all your fault. laugh Rita


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #7941 01/26/10 07:12 AM
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I'll take a shot at Hal's intent...

As you can see in Character Palette, your music glyphs are all included in several font collections, so he's suggesting that you use a "common" font such as Arial in your e-mails; I'm not certain what the "via html" part refers to, but if your sister's PC has any such setting it should probably be set to accept html.

Try dashing off an e-mail with all the Arial glyphs in it, and see if anything comes out the other end of the pipe. (Try using both Mail>Menu bar>Message>Text Encoding>Automatic and Unicode (UTF-8), and let us know how you make out.


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Re: Incorporating Fonts
artie505 #7942 01/26/10 07:51 AM
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Thanks artie... i use a different email client (Postbox), and i've never even toyed with Apple's "Mail" (hmm, wonder why they didn't call it iMail grin ) -- so anyway, i'd have to fish around before finding those settings (and still not be sure how well they work without trying them).

Re: Incorporating Fonts
Hal Itosis #7943 01/26/10 08:02 AM
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> Thanks artie...

Happy to have helped, Hal, but even happier to have (apparently) correctly divined your intent.


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In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Incorporating Fonts
artie505 #7948 01/26/10 07:03 PM
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OK. I just sent two test emails to my sis. One with auto and arial and one with UTF-8 and Arial.

Still don't know if she gets HTML. She isn't in my state so I can't run over and look and don't know how to check a PC for that anyway.

I'll get back to you.

Thanks. smile

Last edited by plantsower; 01/26/10 07:03 PM.

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Re: Incorporating Fonts
plantsower #8010 01/29/10 08:33 AM
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> OK. I just sent two test emails to my sis.

I've got a friend who, sadly, runs a PC (Yep... Just one [friend with a PC, that is]! smile ), and the musical notes in the e-mail I sent him all made it through the pipe.

Trouble is, though, that the only two setting he knows on his thing are "Asleep" and "Awake," so he'll be useless as an assistant trouble-shooter.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Incorporating Fonts
artie505 #8027 01/29/10 06:41 PM
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Thanks for doing that, Artie. I was going to ask if you had a junk email I could send the notes to and then I remembered who I was talking to!!! A MAC PERSON - DUH!!! I need to find someone else to send these notes to. My husband has a PC and they came out like little squares on his, too.

Not having worked with a pc for years, I don't remember how to change to check for html on it. He uses Mail.com. Maybe I can check that and see how it's set. If he has a choice to go HTML and hasn't, I can try that when I get a chance. I'm not sure if it makes a difference whether one can accept html settings in a Gmail account (my sis)or it has to be on the whole computer? Not that savvy.

I sure didn't expect to still be talking about this. I'm willing to drop it if you are. smile Rita


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