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cambot
Participant
June 15, 2017
Answered

Use font Skia in InDesign?

  • June 15, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 5306 views

InDesign only recognizes the "Regular" of Skia (an Apple Font). It does not recognize the variants (Bold, Extended, Condensed, etc). I understand that this is a well known problem so apparently Adobe has a vested interest in not fixing it.   I have tried placing the .ttf file in the Fonts folding in the Application folder for InDesign. Doesn't work.

Any ideas?  I've also tried to find other fonts (hopefully free) that are similar to Skia. Suggestions?

Would trying to convert Skia to a different format help?  I've tried a few font converters, so far without luck.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Cari Jansen

If you have an image of the Skia font, you can use Photoshop's Match Font feature to find a similar looking font (I'm assuming here you might have Adobe Creative Cloud access and have Adobe Photoshop installed as part of that on your system).

  1. Open an image that contains text set in Skia (you could open a PDF of a job you've set with Skia for example).
  2. Use the Crop tool to crop the image so it isolates just the text to match (or you can use the Rectangle Marquee tool to select an area in the image that contains text set in Skia).
  3. Choose Type > Match Font, select the Show fonts available to sync from Typekit.

Photoshop will look for fonts in your system as well as those available as part of Adobe Typekit, you can then select a font to use.

Alternatively you can use 'Identifont' to look for similar fonts:

Skia seems to be a very old font that has known issues indeed with non-Apple applications - there are a range of posts available on various forums online that verify that. So my recommendation would indeed be to replace this font with a lookalike.

Alternatively, with just the Regular style available in InDesign you could 'fake' things (not that I'd recommend that, as it does 'bastardise' the font when you do that):

  • Add a stroke to the font to create a bolder version
  • Adjust the Horizontal Scale of the font to create condensed versions

3 replies

Jongware
Community Expert
JongwareCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 15, 2017

cambot  wrote

InDesign only recognizes the "Regular" of Skia (an Apple Font). It does not recognize the variants (Bold, Extended, Condensed, etc). I understand that this is a well known problem so apparently Adobe has a vested interest in not fixing it.

The scaling technology used in Skia was Apple's own invention, and only worked (note: past tense!) with a selected small set of Apple's own software. Adobe never has supported 3rd party's privately invented font formats; they focus on the acknowledged world-wide standard OpenType (of which they were a prominent co-developer). (This is not a unique case either. Apple's private additions to fonts also cause other problems with standards conforming software. Just search this forum for anything related to "Helvetica Neue".)

Apple's proprietary font scaling technology has been phased out by themselves as well; technically, it's still available "under the hood" for programmers, but all controls have been removed from the software that was prior able to use it. Various old posts about this suggest it happened around 2006, i.e., well over a decade ago. Not really an incentive for Adobe to support it.

But the good news is that the idea behind Variable Axis/Multiple Master fonts is just too good to let slide into the void, so there are proposals to resurrect the technology, under the name "OpenType Font Variation". Here you can find out the technical background: OpenType Font Variations Overview ; it even mentions Apple's Skia as an example, although of course the old design tables (which were, after all, Apple's own invention at the time, not discussed with the OpenType developers) are not quite the same as those in the proposed newer system:

Note: The Skia font is included in Apple's OSX platform. At the time of publication of the OpenType 1.8 specification, existing versions of the Skia font do not conform to the OpenType 1.8 specification as a whole, but the implementation of variation data in the 'gvar' table, which is what is illustrated here, does conform.

MW Design
MW Design
Inspiring
June 15, 2017

From what I fathom, the variable technology behind this font was abandoned macOS Sierra should be able to download them via fontbook. There are 10 styles. Personally, I would just pick a different font.

Fonts included with macOS Sierra - Apple Support

click on the download link in the opening paragraph and it will take you to:

Fonts available for download in macOS Sierra

To download and enable any of these fonts:

  1. Open Font Book from your Applications folder.

  2. Select the font to download. Fonts available for download appear dimmed in the list of fonts.

  3. Click the Download button in the upper-right corner of the window, or choose Edit > Download.

    C
    Cari Jansen
    Legend
    June 15, 2017

    Were you able to download the invidual font styles in OS Sierra for Skia?

    I don't have a Download option available in Font Book (never tried this before, so I might be overlooking something).

    I only see a 'Show in Finder' option which takes me to a single Skia.ttf available in the system. (I disabled the font as well to check if that gave me access). 

    MW Design
    MW Design
    Inspiring
    June 15, 2017

    I use Windows, Cari. I only know what I read at the link.

      C
      Cari JansenCorrect answer
      Legend
      June 15, 2017

      If you have an image of the Skia font, you can use Photoshop's Match Font feature to find a similar looking font (I'm assuming here you might have Adobe Creative Cloud access and have Adobe Photoshop installed as part of that on your system).

      1. Open an image that contains text set in Skia (you could open a PDF of a job you've set with Skia for example).
      2. Use the Crop tool to crop the image so it isolates just the text to match (or you can use the Rectangle Marquee tool to select an area in the image that contains text set in Skia).
      3. Choose Type > Match Font, select the Show fonts available to sync from Typekit.

      Photoshop will look for fonts in your system as well as those available as part of Adobe Typekit, you can then select a font to use.

      Alternatively you can use 'Identifont' to look for similar fonts:

      Skia seems to be a very old font that has known issues indeed with non-Apple applications - there are a range of posts available on various forums online that verify that. So my recommendation would indeed be to replace this font with a lookalike.

      Alternatively, with just the Regular style available in InDesign you could 'fake' things (not that I'd recommend that, as it does 'bastardise' the font when you do that):

      • Add a stroke to the font to create a bolder version
      • Adjust the Horizontal Scale of the font to create condensed versions
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