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M
monadyne
Participant
September 23, 2016
Answered

Adobe Font families no longer working properly

  • September 23, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1193 views

Years ago, I purchased Adobe Garamond and Adobe Caslon fonts for typesetting books. These are professional-level fonts. Each family contains not only the standard typefaces, i.e., plain, bold, italic, bold italic, but other weights as well. Also, they contain "expert" additions, such as ornaments and expert typefaces which are small capital letters, fractions ( 1/4 ) etc.

I purchased the fonts to use them in a number of different applications, some for typesetting (READY, SET, GO!) and other word processing applications, and they worked properly, of course. I'm using Mac OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan, and the fonts no longer work properly. If I select Adobe Garamond or Adobe Caslon and apply that to some text in Apple's Pages application, the text is then shown correctly in the Adobe Garamond or Caslon typeface. If I try to use agaramondexp (Adobe Garamond Expert), AGARAMOND TITLING, or any of the other "expert" typefaces in Caslon, the text is converted to a sanserif typeface.

These all work in a text layer in Adobe Photoshop, but not in other software such as Apple's Pages or TextEdit.

How can I restore these fonts to their full functionality? I use Pages to typeset books which I then export as Adobe pdf files. I need the expert and other fonts in the font families in order to do professional work.

Thank you!

--Jack

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Dov Isaacs

Apparently, you are using the old MacOS Type 1 versions of these fonts. Adobe has not issued any new Type 1 fonts for over 15 years; the entire Adobe Type Library is now in cross-platform OpenType CFF format. That having been said, Adobe still fully supports these fonts with Adobe applications and there is base support for Type 1 fonts in both MacOS and Windows (albeit, there are separate Type 1 font formats for MacOS and Windows).

Other vendors have discontinued or limited support for these older fonts. Going forward, Microsoft no longer supports Type 1 fonts on the Windows version of Office (Office 2013 and Office 2016), although there is support for at least the basic fonts on MacOS Office 2016.

You probably need to consult Apple directly with regards to their products. It is possible that you need to switch keyboard encodings to access the glyphs in those supplemental fonts (i.e., the so-called “expert typefaces”). You might also try doing an internet search to see if and how others may have solved this problem with these legacy fonts.

Going forward, if you do intend to continue doing significant work with Adobe Garamond, Adobe Caslon, or other such fonts, you should seriously consider moving to the OpenType CFF versions of these fonts. Why? All the characters including small caps, lower case numerals, swashes, ornaments, titling characters, etc. are all in one typeface and more modern versions of applications know how to invoke features of these OpenType fonts to make automatic use of these alternative glyphs if you so desire and when appropriate.

          - Dov

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov IsaacsCorrect answer
Legend
September 24, 2016

Apparently, you are using the old MacOS Type 1 versions of these fonts. Adobe has not issued any new Type 1 fonts for over 15 years; the entire Adobe Type Library is now in cross-platform OpenType CFF format. That having been said, Adobe still fully supports these fonts with Adobe applications and there is base support for Type 1 fonts in both MacOS and Windows (albeit, there are separate Type 1 font formats for MacOS and Windows).

Other vendors have discontinued or limited support for these older fonts. Going forward, Microsoft no longer supports Type 1 fonts on the Windows version of Office (Office 2013 and Office 2016), although there is support for at least the basic fonts on MacOS Office 2016.

You probably need to consult Apple directly with regards to their products. It is possible that you need to switch keyboard encodings to access the glyphs in those supplemental fonts (i.e., the so-called “expert typefaces”). You might also try doing an internet search to see if and how others may have solved this problem with these legacy fonts.

Going forward, if you do intend to continue doing significant work with Adobe Garamond, Adobe Caslon, or other such fonts, you should seriously consider moving to the OpenType CFF versions of these fonts. Why? All the characters including small caps, lower case numerals, swashes, ornaments, titling characters, etc. are all in one typeface and more modern versions of applications know how to invoke features of these OpenType fonts to make automatic use of these alternative glyphs if you so desire and when appropriate.

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
M
monadyneAuthor
Participant
September 24, 2016

Thank you for your informed answer to my issue, Dov. I appreciate your taking the time to provide such a detailed response.

I've managed to find online the expert, swash, titling and ornamental fonts I needed and they now work in my non-Adobe applications. I wouldn't have known to have looked if you hadn't given me your excellent advice.

Thanks again!

--Jack

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