dot-font: Putting OpenType Through its Paces

John D. Berry

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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.  If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here.  You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

So what’s it like actually using OpenType fonts in your work? Is it easier? Harder? Does it make a difference?

OpenType, in case you lost track of the latest type technology, is a cross-platform font format co-developed by Adobe and Microsoft that offers the potential for extended character sets and other typographic niceties built into the core font. Not all OpenType fonts have extra refinements built in, but those that do (Adobe markets these as “Pro” fonts) can make life much simpler for the type user. Instead of needing to load a separate font to access old-style figures, for example, you can just choose the appropriate character in your application (providing the application is OpenType savvy).

I’ve recently started putting an OpenType font family to work, in the most pragmatic environment possible: the production of a book. Not only am I using OpenType fonts, but I made the decision to switch to the OpenType version of the typeface in the middle of production, after having created the first set of galleys for the book in a non-OpenType version. Despite the extra work and the risk of changing font formats in midstream, I thought that production would end up being easier, and that the book’s files would have a longer life for potential future editions, if I used the new, rather than the old, font format. So far, I haven’t been disappointed.

Minion Pro

The typeface was Minion, Robert Slimbach’s workhorse old-style type family, which looks a bit like an updated and more dynamic version of Bembo. Minion was inspired by a number of different roman and italic types from the Renaissance; the design grew out of Slimbach’s researches in the Plantin-Moretus Museum while he was going back to original sources to develop the Adobe Garamond family. Minion, however, despite its suggestions of Bembo, is not based on any specific 16th-century types; it’s Slimbach’s interpretation of that style of typeface.

Minion has been available for about a dozen years now, and it has gone through three distinct phases. It was first issued by Adobe in 1990, as one of the early Adobe Originals, in a type family that consisted of three weights in roman and italic, with all the typographic refinements necessary for a book text face: small caps, old-style figures, accents, a full set of f-ligatures, and a handful of nicely drawn ornaments. Several years later, when Adobe was promoting “multiple master” technology as the next big thing in type, Slimbach turned Minion into a family of multiple master fonts with three axes: weight, width, and optical size. (Minion was, as I recall, the first typeface to come out with an optical size axis—meaning that the details of the letter design changed subtly from the 6-point master, at one end of the axis, to the 72-point master at the other end. Each master design was fine-tuned to look best at a specific size.) Now that Adobe has turned away from multiple master technology and embraced OpenType as the wave of the future, the refinements of Minion multiple master have been adapted to the huge potential character set of OpenType, and the Minion family has been expanded into Minion Pro, which includes both Greek and Cyrillic alphabets in the same OpenType fonts as the Latin-alphabet designs.

(Any typeface can be turned into an OpenType font, and many have simply been directly converted, by Adobe and other font vendors. But Adobe came up with the “Pro” name for fonts that make use of OpenType’s potential for including a wide range of typographic refinements in a single digital font—refinements like extended sets of accented characters, expanded sets of ligatures and alternate characters, and complementary designs for multiple scripts.)

Setting Text Type by the Pound

The book I’ve been working on is a very large book of poetry, the Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (to be published this fall by Copper Canyon Press). I designed both the cover and the interior, and I’m handling the production of the pages—the typesetting, in other words. (There is no art, except on the cover.) Since I have used Minion quite a bit in designs for Copper Canyon—including an earlier, much smaller volume of Rexroth’s love poems—I settled on Minion for this book. For several years, I have been using Minion multiple master, because it was so easy to make specific versions suitable for particular uses. I had previously created a specific “instance” for use in 11-point text: an optical size that was actually slightly smaller (because I wanted the letters to appear a little sturdier than the 11-point master), a width very slightly wider than the regular width, and a normal weight. I used this instance for the text of the new book.

Although all the typographic refinements were present in the Minion type family, it took a certain amount of manipulation to use them. I would do a search-and-replace for numerals, for instance, changing all the 0’s, 1’s, 2’s, etc. from the lining (cap-height) numerals of the main font to the old-style (lowercase) numerals of the Expert font. Similarly, I had to search for the combinations that ought to use f-ligatures—and I had to do it in a logical order (search for ffi and ffl first, before searching for ff, fi, or fl; and don’t forget to check the “match case” box!). I had set up paragraph styles and character styles using these fonts, and I applied them throughout what turned into a nearly 800-page book.

I was doing both design and production in InDesign 1.5. One of the current advantages of InDesign over QuarkXPress is that InDesign has support for OpenType fonts built in. All you have to do is check an option on a menu, for instance, and InDesign applies ligatures to your text, if the font has them. In an ordinary Type 1 font with an Adobe-standard character set, the only ligatures that will appear are the fi and fl ligatures; in a Pro font, however, all the f-ligatures will be used, and possibly others as well. (InDesign 2.0 gives you several levels of ligatures to choose from—and some of the Pro fonts have quite a collection of alternate and joined characters.) Changing all the numerals to old-style figures is also just a matter of checking an option, as is switching from lowercase to small caps.

The book was so huge that in the first galleys I had left most of the numerals unconverted and the ligatures unchanged, to be dealt with in the second round of production. Between the first and the second galleys, however, I realized that if I were using Minion Pro, I wouldn’t have to do all that searching and replacing: I could just build options like using ligatures and old-style figures into my styles, and automate the whole process. And the newly standard text version of Minion looked very good on the page. (The Minion Pro Opticals package includes four different optical sizes, from “caption” through “display”—not quite the infinitely fluid range of Minion multiple master, but a very useful selection nonetheless.)

So I switched. I bought the Minion Pro fonts, and as I made the corrections and changes from the proofread first galleys, I converted all the fonts from the multiple master version to the OpenType version of Minion. The most tedious part of this was editing my styles, replacing the multiple master fonts I had specified with OpenType fonts instead. (Since I had based most of my styles on a few core styles, most of my changes could simply ripple through. But there are always a few hand-done refinements that need to be changed by hand.) Because of the new way OpenType handles small caps, I found that sometimes I’d end up with a few places where InDesign was trying to find a Small Caps & Old-Style Figures font within the Minion Pro font family—and of course it didn’t exist. When I opened the files again, InDesign would tell me that there were fonts specified that it couldn’t find; luckily, it was easy to convert them globally to the right fonts. The time spent doing this was substantially less than the time I would have spent applying ligatures and old-style figures, even with an efficiently organized search-and-replace procedure.

That Would Be a “Yes”

So far, as I said, I’ve had no complaint, and I’ve found that using the OpenType fonts—at least in InDesign—speeds up my production work, by making it possible to automatic the kind of typographic refinements that used to require extra time and effort. (Because I’m the sort of designer I am, I always go to this trouble. But not everyone does. Anything that automates quality in typesetting for the wider world of production will mean better, more readable type—especially in text—and an easier, more pleasing experience for the ultimate users: the readers.)

It seems to me that the fonts take less time to download, too, when I’m printing laser proofs, although I haven’t actually measured this. The only technical glitch I’ve run across is that my system didn’t seem to like having both the multiple master and the OpenType versions of Minion active at the same time; this wasn’t a big problem when I was converting from one to the other, but if I had to be working simultaneously in files that used both versions, it would be a limitation. (There may be a way around this that I simply haven’t noticed.)

But I’m not really trying to do a lab test here, with benchmarks and quantifiable results. I’m just reporting on a single real-world example of OpenType fonts in action.

So far, I’d say, so good.