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Trouble with a Font, Help if you have time.

S

smullen

New Member
OK, I have an order from a Car Club that wants like 35+ logos made, really simple just text in a straight line, no graphic...

The problem is they want a font called Futura XblkIt BT italic + underline, their choice, not mine...

I looked through my Signs program's collection of fonts, , its not there.... My version of MS Office/Word 2003, did not even have it...

So I told the guy I did not have it, but I'd see if I could find it online to buy real quick... He e-mailed it to me in a reply to that... I figured, I'd try it and if it worked, I'd buy a legit copy as I been wainting to buy a few nice fonts anyway...

So, I installed it, copied and pasted it to my Fonts dir and it installed. This is a "True Type font. (.ttf) Now the font(s) shows up in Word and and several versions of it show up in my sign app, VE LXI Master, but none of them say Futura XblkIt,

The Sign app now lists:
Futura Bk BT
Futura II Bold
Futura II Extrabold Cond
Futura II Medium
Futura II LtCn Bt
Futura II Md Bt

But no Futura XblkIt BT italic + underline, I'm guessing the "BT italic + underline" are attributes that I would add to the font, but I don't see the XblkIt... Am I doing something wrong or is there a different file that is better to use??? Also, when I selsect one of those, I can't use the Bold, Underline, or Itialics button option, its greayed/ghosted, like its not avalible for some reason...

Any help would be great, I'd like to get this going and make these guys happy...
 
Fred Weiss

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
First let's analyze the font name: Futura XblkIt BT italic + underline

Futura is the name of the font family.
X stands for Extra.
blk stands for Black which is a weight of a particular member of the Futura font family.
It stands for Italic.
BT stands for Bitstream which is one of many foundries that offers licensed versions of Futura font family members.
Italic in the way you are using it is redundant.
+ underline is a program feature you can apply in some applications. It is not a font.

The font you want is located HERE

The features found in Microsoft Word to embolden a font or to italicize it or underline it do not work in other applications. The only thing your signmaking program will do is read the vectors of the font. They can then have additional slant added to them and they can be emboldened by outlining them and deleting the original vector. What Microsoft does is mostly monitor display and printing tricks. It is not modifying the vectors and providing a way to export them so you can import them into your signmaking application.

Underscore is the same kind of a deal and you must create a vector in your signmaking application to be the underscore by using your rectangle drawing tool.

To have the old style Bold and Italic buttons work correctly you must actually have four seperate members of a font family installed. These would normally be Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. In the case of Extra Black and Extra Black Italic, you need to have both to toggle back and forth between the straight up (Roman) version and the Italic version. To fill you customer's requirement, you only need Extra Black Italic to be correctly installed in Windows.

There is only one way to correctly install a TrueType font into Windows and it is not the way you described. To do it correctly:

Open your Control Panel
Double click the icon named Fonts
Click on File > Install to open the font install dialogue
Navigate to where the font to be installed is located and select it
Click on OK

Copying and pasting fonts into the Fonts Folder may seem to work at times but it will not properly register the fonts with your operating system.
 
D

dark3d

New Member
Is there an OS limitation on the number of installed fonts? for Winxp? Other than slow enumeration at startup of my graphics app?
 
iSign

iSign

New Member
dark3d, I googled that same question just the other day & came across several discussions about that. The consensus seemed to be that whatever was causing the limitation in W95/98 is no longer present in WXP, & as such, there is not a maximum number of fonts dictated specifically by the OS... it was mentioned that different programs may react adversly to larger numbers of fonts... but I could not find any known "limit"

I'm interested if anyone has more difinitive information, but on one machine I plan to reformat in the next few weeks, I added 500 fonts to the 750 I already had, & so far it has not presented any problems.
 
B

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Those Bitstream fonts are very common. CorelDRAW has used them for over a decade. They've also been a staple in the dead CASmate program and its successors Inspire (also dead) and FlexiSign.

WinXP may take away some of the limits on how many fonts one can install within the system. Still, I don't think it is a good idea to have any more than 300 or 400 fonts installed. XP may lift some of the overhead. But the use of OpenType fonts dramatically increases font file size, especially fonts that have extended Unicode character sets. A TT or T1 font that used to be 50Kb in size might run 250kb in OTF format.

Too many fonts increases your application load time. It can also slow down application performance in general. And too many fonts makes you less productive. You'll spend more time dinking around in the font menu.

I still use Adobe Type Manager 4.1, even under XP, because I have a number of Multiple Master fonts I bought over the years that I intend to keep using as long as I can (Nueva, Myriad, Minion, Penumbra, etc.). I haven't run into a font limit problem (yet) under XP. But I have had warnings in Win2000 and Win98 previously. Too many fonts gets the win.ini upwards to the 64kb file size limit. I'm not sure if XP uses the same method; it may not. Still, I keep some sense of discipline about which fonts I have active. On occaision, I'll open Adobe Type Manager and just delete all the fonts and start over clean. Sometimes this manuver can jog you out of a design rut.
 
S

smullen

New Member
Fred Weiss said:
First let's analyze the font name: Futura XblkIt BT italic + underline

Futura is the name of the font family.
X stands for Extra.
blk stands for Black which is a weight of a particular member of the Futura font family.
It stands for Italic.
BT stands for Bitstream which is one of many foundries that offers licensed versions of Futura font family members.
Italic in the way you are using it is redundant.
+ underline is a program feature you can apply in some applications. It is not a font.

The font you want is located HERE

The features found in Microsoft Word to embolden a font or to italicize it or underline it do not work in other applications. The only thing your signmaking program will do is read the vectors of the font. They can then have additional slant added to them and they can be emboldened by outlining them and deleting the original vector. What Microsoft does is mostly monitor display and printing tricks. It is not modifying the vectors and providing a way to export them so you can import them into your signmaking application.

Underscore is the same kind of a deal and you must create a vector in your signmaking application to be the underscore by using your rectangle drawing tool.

To have the old style Bold and Italic buttons work correctly you must actually have four seperate members of a font family installed. These would normally be Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. In the case of Extra Black and Extra Black Italic, you need to have both to toggle back and forth between the straight up (Roman) version and the Italic version. To fill you customer's requirement, you only need Extra Black Italic to be correctly installed in Windows.

There is only one way to correctly install a TrueType font into Windows and it is not the way you described. To do it correctly:

Open your Control Panel
Double click the icon named Fonts
Click on File > Install to open the font install dialogue
Navigate to where the font to be installed is located and select it
Click on OK

Copying and pasting fonts into the Fonts Folder may seem to work at times but it will not properly register the fonts with your operating system.
Click to expand...

Fred, As usual, you were right on... Your solution helped... :U Rock:

Thanks guys... This place really is a resource, I'm so glad I found it..
 
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