NewDeal Hot Tip 1405

[Hot Tips for...] Fonts

Fonts and Document Transferability

A document file created with fonts that other people may not have is not easily transferred to someone else.

This has been resolved in the font-promiscuous world of the Macintosh in the following way. Incidentally, this is a paraphrasing and condensation of guidelines set out for user groups by the Apple User Group Liaison (an office of Apple Computer, Inc. that provides support and materials for user groups).

  1. If you are creating a document for electronic transmission (i.e. posting on bulletin boards, online services, Email systems, the Internet, etc.), and that document's substance is not chiefly design-dependent, then use one of the PostScript fonts common to the LaserWriter Plus standard.
  2. If your document is an example of graphic design or page layout and must require an unusual font as a significant design element, then either clearly designate the font in the file description or include the font with your document if doing so would not violate the font publisher's copyright or license agreement.
  3. If such is available, use one of the several font and/or professional illustration programs to convert the fonts to PostScript bezier outlines. If such programs are used, then no clear designation (or the originating font) is necessary, and these documents will be easily printed on PostScript compatible printers.
Unfortunately, not many NewDeal customers have ready use of font outline conversion software (such as Fontographer 3.3 on the Mac) or professional illustration programs (such as CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator) although such programs or similar ones have become more available on the PC for the Microsoft Windows platform. But neither do most Macintosh users. Therefore, most users rely upon guidelines 1 and 2 above.

For our purposes, if you intend to share your document widely, the simplest approach is to use only the standard fonts that come with your NewDeal software whenever possible. Otherwise you'll need to provide the name and source of any special fonts that you use, or else the recipients of your document file may not be able to see your document the way you intended.

One last approach is to convert your text to bitmap format using NewDraw or the Draw layer. This way, the recipient of your file will not need the corresponding font. This approach will only work for text in graphic text objects and may be practical only for the headlines and not the body text of your document. A drawback here is that the conversion to bitmap usually results in a loss of resolution. While text that has been converted to bitmap format may look the same on screen, it will usually print with a more blocky or stairstepping appearance.


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Last Modified 2 Mar 1999