Fontographer PS fonts issue with Yosemite

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Level 1

8 points

Fontographer PS fonts issue with Yosemite

I have created a number of PS fonts (.otf) with Fontagrapher 5. They have been working flawlessly ever since on my MacBook Air (mid 2012) 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD.

Since moving yesterday from Mavericks to Mac OS X Yosemite, things are terrible. All fonts created with Fontographer are not displaying and printing correctly …. my 6 indian music books and numerous documents in hindi/english diacritical are thus unusable. I tried with Nisus Writer Pro, Text Edit and Mellel to no avail.

Checking with the Apple software FontBook, it says all my Fontographer Fonts are « usable » (green ok check) and that there is no conflict/problem. To be sure, I removed all factory fonts which could potentially make problems (orange warning), rebooted the Mac but, despite that, nothing works properly. Fonts are incredibly SCRETCHED on display (space between characters is huge) and some of them don't print as they are displayed. I also naturally updated the printer (Xerox Work Center 6605 DN) driver to the latest Yosemite compatible version (oct.16, 2014) but that doesn't change anything. I also tried different ways of making pdf from the different word processors but the same thing occured on pdf.

Please, kindly check and inquire about this important issue with Apple fonts experts. Number of us, using Fontographer Fonts, must be facing the same incompatibility with Yosemite.

Please do let me know what I can do to solve the problem. I don't even know how I can downgrade to Maverick yet.

Thanking you in advance for a quick reply

Patrick MOUTAL

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10), Fontographer PS Fonts issue

Posted on Oct 18, 2014 1:54 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,946 points

Oct 18, 2014 6:09 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

You are only talking to other users like yourself in these forums. You need to repost the details of your problem at this page for Apple to see it

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Are your fonts Unicode or non-standard encoding?

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Answer 2

Ganeshbaba Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2014 7:14 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks for the advice. Just posted on Apple feedback... I made the latest versions of these Devanagari fonts 2 years ago with Fontographer 5.0... which I can't open anymore since I upgraded to Yosemite ! I am, of course, a registered user of Fontographer. Wrote them but still awaiting for an answer (Week-end time...)

Therefore, difficult for me to answer. I think they are Unicode, anyway they are saved as ".otf" in my personal user library/fonts and were functionning flawlessly for the last 2 years with Mavericks and previous systems.

- FontBook says everything my fonts are fine (validate fonts)

- I tried to empty fonts cache using Font Nuke, to no avail.

On left, samples from Nisus Writer Pro, on right its conversion into pdf...

Things get even worse with the main font used in my books...as it prints very small with wrong spacing.

Anyhow, thanks anyhow for your answer and suggestions.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,946 points

Oct 18, 2014 8:54 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

Thanks for the info.

Do you find the same problem with any fonts provided by Apple or elsewhere (i.e. not made by you)? Apple engineers will need to be able to duplicate your problem, and that will be hard unless they have a font which acts in the same manner.

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Answer 4

Ganeshbaba Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2014 9:16 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

No Tom, it seems I don't have problems with other Apple, Microsoft or third parties fonts. Only 3 of the home-made fonts are working nice but all the others, although okeyed in FontBook, do print totally wrong on paper or pdf. They were all saved as Open Type Post-Script. That's all I can say as I still can't open Fontographer. FontLab people are surely out for the WE !

This is a scan of the (right) printed page 51 - originally a Nisus Writer Pro .rtf and of its printed scanned version under Yosemite.

You see the huge issue ! Nisus Writer Pro is not at fault (same happens with TextEdit and Mellel). There is a problem converting files using my fonts into pdf and printing them.

Thanks for your concern.

This is one of these nightmare Mac week-end like it already happened a few times since Jan.84... and downgrading to Mavericks is not really my cup of tea.

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,946 points

Oct 18, 2014 9:33 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

Ganeshbaba wrote:

downgrading to Mavericks is not really my cup of tea.

As a general rule, if you rely on your mac for serious work, I would recommend that you never upgrade the OS without having a bootable copy of your old working system available on another drive or partition, so you can always go back to working the way were before in case something does not work right in the new one. I think returning to Mavericks is probably your only option for the short run, unless the Fontographer people have some advice on modifying your fonts, which may not be worth the trouble. Is there some feature of Yosemite that is indispensable for you?

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Answer 6

Ganeshbaba Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2014 9:44 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom,

I had a BackUp on an external disk but I found out about this issue more than a day after using Yosemite. I never thought there would be a font issue and I was working in FM Pro databases with "ordinary fonts"...and not in Nisus. Then, with all the upgrades of apps, as it seemed to be working allright, I decided to make a new backup with SuperDuper on my external Thunderbolt HD !!!

I still have a Time-Machine backup but it is so **** slow (even with an Ethernet connection) to come back to Mavericks version, also I feel it is not so much reliable and what I read on the Web about downgrading is not very encouraging... Last but not least, I don't want to stay stuck to Mavericks until my last day on earth ! In last resort, that's what I will have to do. 😟

Have a good WE and thanks

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Answer 7

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,152 points

Oct 18, 2014 9:50 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

If you wouldn't mind, could you email one of your custom fonts to retoucher at jklstudios dot com ? I'd like to see if I get the same results under Yosemite on my 2010 Mac Pro. I could also look at the font in FontLab and maybe see what's causing the error. Such as you may not have assigned Unicode code points to the font. In such a case, it can be an .otf font and still not be Unicode.

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Answer 8

Ganeshbaba Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2014 11:11 AM in response to Kurt Lang

Of course I can send you the .otf font whose sample I showed in a post (scan of paper printed book page 51 and scan of its printed version from Nisus Writer Pro's doc .rtf.

That's very kind of you. I can't remember if I used Unicode for all my fonts families. I have designed a keyboard of my own because I had to redefine dead keys and keys assignment (minuscule option, maj. option etc.). I did that (ages back !!!) with ResEdit (a pioneer !) then, had to remap a few years ago with Ukulele (a free Soft that an Apple Developper gave me) to build custom keyboards.

The font I could give for a test is based on Times. It has diacritical marks to transliterate words from Hindi / Sanskrit to English/French roman letterst and also allows writing Indian Musical notes (in Hindi/Devanagari letters) with its main notes and rhythm symbols used for its linear notation.

- Just tried to send you - as a doc. in this post - a zip version of the font but it didn't work. Please, do mail me at ****** and I'll send it immediately. Thanks for your help.

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Answer 9

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,152 points

Oct 18, 2014 11:11 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

Thanks. I'll see what I can spot, but there's no telling what success I'll have when you've built your fonts to work with a highly customized keyboard layout.

I also have no experience with keyboard layouts such as Devanagari. Tom Gewecke is the resident expert at that sort of thing.

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Answer 10

Ganeshbaba Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2014 11:15 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

1001 Thanks to Kurt and the Host to remove my mail address so quickly. I was a bit fast in giving it !

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Answer 11

Ganeshbaba Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 18, 2014 3:08 PM in response to Ganeshbaba

Well, Kurt Lang did solve my problem and I won't ever be enough thankful to him. He tried one of my font and took the time to examine it with FontLab Studio. In case other persons experiment the same type of troubles, I am pasting the mail I got (along with the corrected font) for info :

Hi Patrick,

I did find one issue in particular. OpenType fonts should have a UTM setting of 1000. These were at 2048. So I changed those and had FontLab Studio rebuild the names (I just let it do its thing).

The originals you had sent wouldn’t even appear in Office 2011. The rebuilt ones do, though for whatever reason, bold italic won’t show. However, you can click the italic and bold buttons and the correct font is used. Otherwise, the new fonts all work as expected in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, TextEdit and others. I tested them in both Mavericks and Yosemite.

Can’t guarantee success, but give these a shot.

Kurt

That guy is an angel. He spent a tremendous amount of time examining, testing on Mavericks and Yosemite and on several apps until resolving the problem. Too helpful, too nice and too competent. That's a treat.

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Answer 12

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,152 points

Oct 19, 2014 12:10 PM in response to Ganeshbaba

Thank you very much, Ganeshbaba. Glad it worked out for you. 🙂

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Answer 13

Nov 4, 2014 9:38 AM in response to Ganeshbaba

Just to clarify, as described, this appears to be a Mac OS X Yosemite bug, and not a font bug.

OpenType PS fonts usually or by default have 1000 UPM. However, a value of 2048 is completely legal, and in fact Adobe has shipped fonts with 2000 or 2048 UPM when a higher resolution was helpful to the design. It is unusual, but completely legitimate. So are smaller UPM sizes.

There is a limit in the format, that all glyph coordinates must be within +/- 4096 units. So a much larger UPM such as 4000+ would likely become problematic for other reasons. But that's presumably not the case here.

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Answer 14

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,152 points

Nov 4, 2014 10:30 AM in response to Thomas Phinney

Not really. A UPM of 1000 for OpenType fonts has a reason. Sure you can use pretty much any value you want up to 16,384 (can't remember what the low end is), but apps expect a UPM of 1000 with OpenType fonts. This applies to both PostScript and TrueType OpenType fonts.

All of Adobe's Font Folio 11 OpenType fonts use 1000. Every one of Apple's supplied OpenType fonts are 1000. As are the fonts Microsoft supplies with Office. Adobe did however somewhat recently release a handful of Asian fonts set to 2048.

If you were to use 2000 as the UPM, fonts you built to what your font editor says is the 10 point height line will display and print as 5 point text. You can use 2000 or other value if you want, but you then have to adjust the size of the drawn fonts to account for how they'll appear in actual use.

There's a lot of ifs and buts and other little ways to make adjustments for other UPM values, but it would be best to use 1000 so all apps can access the fonts without errors.

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Answer 15

Nov 4, 2014 11:02 AM in response to Kurt Lang

Most apps are completely insulated from this question entirely by APIs. They do not "expect" anything.

I'm not saying is is wise to build with a non-standard UPM value without a really good reason. Designers should be aware of real-world limitations and work within them. But a Yosemite failure to handle unusual UPM values, newly introduced in that OS, is would be 100% an OS bug, not a font bug. The workaround may be to change the font, but that does not make it a font bug.

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