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narc_monkey Author

Level 1

0 points

Altered Font Spacing Crippling for Designers

Installed Snow Leopard on the first day, not a good idea. I am a graphic designer, I work in Quark and the Adobe Suite, with Suitcase Fusion 2. That said, not long (a couple hours) after I made the jump to Snow Leopard, I had work to do.

I open my first flash doc, activate Univers PostScript and I notice my whole layout has gone sour. This is because an extra bit of vertical padding is being added at the top of my text. It happens with some TrueType and OpenType fonts as well, while some others are not subject to the spacing issues. Very odd, and very menacing.

So far I have seen this as a major problem resulting in alot of reformatting on several occasions. Anyone else had this issue? Is Apple going to patch this or are there any workarounds? When they do, are all the files I have now fixed going to re-flow with poor vertical spacing in the opposite direction? When I send my collected files to people running 10.5, are my text fixes going to effect how the documents are displayed on their machines? I can't have this, I would have expected Apple of all developers to take this into consideration, especially with the volume of designers that pay the extra cash use their products.

iMac Intel 3.06GHz, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Aug 31, 2009 12:08 PM

130 replies

Kurt Lang

Level 9

62,190 points

Apr 5, 2010 1:22 PM in response to Bill Schwartz

Finally had a chance to do a little testing after installing 10.6.3 at least a few days ago.

I took a handful of Type 1 fonts that were definitely not working correctly in SL before 10.6.3. One of them namely being ITC Flora from an older Illustrator disk. Created a simple document of text paragraphs in the most up to date versions of InDesign CS4 (6.0.4) and Quark 8 (8.1.6). Using eight various fonts (four Type 1, two OpenType PostScript, two Mac OS 9 suitcase TrueType), I assigned a font to each paragraph in the same order, same point sizes in each page layout application.

The results were perfect! Examining the output from a PostScript laser printer (HP 5000N) over a light table, the output in Leopard from each app matched to each other, as did the output from Snow Leopard. More importantly, I could mix and match any of the sheets from either OS or app and they fit!

For the last test, I grabbed a project from six years ago off archive which contained several old Type 1 fonts supplied by the client. The output of that version 4.x Quark document also fit between Leopard and SL.

Whatever was the last issue that was causing fonts (Type 1 in particular) to behave incorrectly in Quark and other apps appears to be fixed.

Big, big thanks to Apple's engineers, Quark, Adobe and whomever else may have been involved in tracking down the issue. That Apple has gotten this far already with a new 64 bit type engine that had to be written from scratch is actually pretty amazing.

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,581 points

Apr 5, 2010 4:25 PM in response to Kurt Lang

Note that the issue with fonts with a glyph that references another glyph that in turn references a third glyph being drawn incorrectly in Preview and other applications that use Mac OS X's text rendering routines continues in 10.6.3. 😟

(Top window Preview, bottom Adobe Reader.)

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11169270

Kurt Lang

Level 9

62,190 points

Apr 5, 2010 5:21 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

Oh, drat! Forgot about that one.

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,581 points

Apr 5, 2010 7:45 PM in response to Kurt Lang

Sorry 'bout that. 😉

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

118,528 points

Apr 5, 2010 8:03 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

Note that the issue with fonts with a glyph that references another glyph that in turn references a third glyph being drawn incorrectly

But if I remember right, no one ever had an example of a real world font that did this -- the example fonts were all constructed to demonstrate the bug.

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,581 points

Apr 5, 2010 8:19 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

I suspect this bug may be behind the "Math characters in Preview" bug that you had investigated:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10950550&#10950550

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

118,528 points

Apr 5, 2010 8:26 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

I suspect this bug may be behind the "Math characters in Preview" bug that you had investigated:

No, I really don't see how a multiple references bug expected to affect diacritics could be connected to the erroneous display of a simple character like U+2207 ∇ in Preview.

Apr 6, 2010 5:25 AM in response to Kurt Lang

"Whatever was the last issue that was causing fonts (Type 1 in particular) to behave incorrectly in Quark and other apps appears to be fixed."

Thanks, Kurt, great news! Are you (or anyone else) able to confirm that the problem is fixed for Quark 7 as well as Quark 8?

Jun 7, 2010 4:30 PM in response to Bill Schwartz

It sounds like the type 1 font problems are solved, and so far my type 1 fonts have worked...2 days into a new laptop, using Quark 8.1.6, InDesign CS5, BUT my OpenType fonts are acting weird. The letter spacing is completely screwed up. Did I miss some fix for the OpenType?

narc_monkey Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 9, 2010 9:05 AM in response to Graphics Goddess

I finally built up the courage to upgrade to Snow Leopard after all the progress noted in this forum. I have a large set of Adobe Font Folio fonts that include both PostScript Type 1 and OpenType fonts. I also work in web design with html/css and flash, and so far so good, no issues. I did notice some minor kerning differences in Quark 8, but those seem almost like a more accurate depiction of final kerning more than anything to me, which is welcomed.

I have tested various common postscript fonts like Frutiger, Myriad, Univers and Adobe Garamond, and they render properly. Same goes for OTF Myriad Pro, News Gothic Std and others. I am working in Adobe CS3, Quark 8 and Suitcase Fusion 3, and couldn't be more pleased at the moment. There's something to be said about the blazing speed of the 64-bit finder and apps too, something like 'dayum'. Finally a seamless upgrade.

Altered Font Spacing Crippling for Designers