Good Dingbat-style font on Adobe Cloud?

[Jennifer@fwm]

Our company is slowly but surely moving towards using only Adobe Cloud fonts in our work flow. One of our new team members is having trouble with our (very old, very over-copied) versions of Zapf Dingbats and Wingdings. Are there equivilents to the Zapf Dingbat or Wingding fonts on the Cloud? 

[meh67]

<Run> Rant mode =Start:
Unfortunately Adobes collection of fonts is WOEFULLY inadequate for most print graphic designers. This is really a shame. Adobe built its company around Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and then actually converted all of us old Quark users to Adobe Indesign (and, speaking for myself, I never looked back - it was a good thing) - but this crippling of us with font usage is a slap in the face. Adobe fonts is definitely not what I would consider a professional font suite - and its search function is terrible. If they are going to corner the market, force us into monthly subscriptions how about at least trying to keep up with a professoinal grade product? The programs are useless for graphic designers without corresponding fonts.

For my part, I cannot depend on Adobe Cloud Fonts to do what I need - and no print designer I know can or even tries. There are any number of simple paid Type Managers (I use TypeFace) and load in my original ITC , .otf version of Zapf Dingats, and all the other dingbat type fonts I have collected (and paid heftly for) over the last 20 years. Unfortunately many of my past purchased fonts are NOT .otf  so have literally THOUSANDS of dollars of Type1PS fonts I could no longer use, because Adobe "No longer supports" them. For an idea - just one nice font collection: Say Hoeflers Gotham - is around $500 for the set. Thats ONE font. I had HUNDREDS of fonts I purchased. Believe me, I get it - time marches on and Postscript wont work online, etc etc. But being a print designers, I never really cared about that aspect of fonts, my printers since the early 90s wanted Postscript for their RIP, so thats what I bought over and over. I am constantly tasked to do versioning on old archive projects. Reports, Mailers, Fact Sheets, etc. and Im tired of trying to explain to my clients that its not a cheap easy fix to update them (at least not in their original form) because Adobe no longer supported the fonts we have been using for years. My dear fellow frustrated designers - the only solution is to go back to a type management software, load your own fonts (as long as you have the right version that fits into Adobe's box) and wait for Adobe to get their act together and start treating the people that actually built their company with a little more respect.
- Build your online font collection - its like amateur hour there now, I laugh when I go there, and so do all my designer friends. To make sure Im not just over-reacting - I just asked a fellow designer and  he said, "You still try to use that?  I gave up on that crap awhile ago - are you kidding?"
- Survey PRINT designers about what fonts they need to get their jobs done and do your best to get those added. If you are going to force us to use only specific fonts - help us out, throw us a bone! You may have to pay more than you want to license actual real professionally designed fonts - but we are paying you EVERY MONTH. A lot of your fonts look like the free ones my grade schooler gets to make his history report "fancy."

<Run> Rant mode =Stop:

[Bobby Henderson]

First of all, there are decent font conversion applications, such as TransType 4 by FontLab Ltd that can convert old T1 fonts to OpenType format. It will convert entire folders of fonts at once.
https://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype/

The Adobe Fonts service currently has 3861 type families from over 200 different type companies. There are no other graphics applications from anyone else with type collections that big. CorelDRAW has around 1000 fonts and most of those are the same fonts they've been bundling since the 1990's. Deneba Canvas had 2000 fonts, but most of those were oddly named copy cat fonts from URW. Adobe's Creative Suite releases had hardly any bundled fonts; I don't remember seeing any in the CS5.5 Master Collection retail box discs. In the 1990's releases of Illustrator or PageMaker came with maybe a couple hundred fonts. The Adobe Fonts service is pretty valuable compared to those offerings.

The only other fonts service available on the market that is any bigger or better than Adobe Fonts is Monotype's subscription font service. It's $199 per year for individual users; they say that gives access to 150,000 fonts. Monotype is a pretty massive company in relation to other type foundries; they've bought many rivals (Linotype, Bitstream, ITC, Hoefler and numerous others). Adobe has the rights to originals typefaces it generated in-house. Monotype owns the rights to many well-known typefaces, be it Zapf Dingats, Helvetica and now even Gotham. Adobe can do only so much to convince Monotype to port any of those typeface to Adobe Fonts.

[meh67]

The number of fonts available means nothing if no one wants to use them.

I looked at the font converter link and the last response pretty much sums it up - LOL.

But this begs the question. I send Adobe $1,619.76 per year for my programs and stock. Couldnt Adobe provide a reliable converter as part of that - why get some other subscription? Apparently they want to corner the market on my business programs and functionality so why not go all in and actually help me out ?

Here is my biggest complaint about all of this. If you were a student at a design school and provided a workstation with Adobe suite of programs and ONLY Adobe Fonts - well you couldnt even attend a Type 101 class. There are a few of the time honored classics there, but not many.
-Helvetica
-Palatino
-Caslon
-Optima

-Lucida Sans

- Akzidenz Grotesk

-Univers

-Frutiger

-Bembo
 - This was just a quick search I did right now of just some of the basic typefaces any beginning design class is going to have you use.

I CAN find Futura, Baskerville, Goudy and Garamond (all great classics and should be part of any basic collection) So thats a start (golf clap)
When looking for Bembo - since it didnt have it , it suggested a fun font called Ice Cream Slanted instead - maybe Ill ask the head of marketing at my clients downtown San Diego office if they prefer that instead.

[Bobby Henderson]

"The number of fonts available means nothing if no one wants to use them."

That's your opinion; it doesn't apply to everyone else. I frequently use fonts synced from the Adobe Fonts service in my everyday work. I design signs, billboards, vehicle wraps and other stuff like that so I have to use a lot of different typefaces. Does Adobe Fonts fill every typographical need? No. However, I don't expect the service to do so either. I wouldn't even expect Monotype's subscription service to cover every typeface made. The $59.99 monthly price of a Creative Cloud subscription is primarily for Adobe's big collection of professional level creative applications. The fonts service is a nice bonus.

Anyone who works with type for a living will still likely have to buy type families from time to time. That's just how it goes. No application for vector graphics or page layout has ever offered a "complete" collection of classic typefaces. Whether you like Adobe Fonts or not there are no rival applications to Illustrator or InDesign that include bigger collections of fonts.

The limited number of typefaces that have been bundled in these applications has changed over the years as licensing agreements change. A long time ago Akzidenz Grotesk was in the 200 fonts package bundled with Adobe Illustrator. Berthold went out of business and now Monotype owns the rights to Akzidenz Grotesk. The same goes for several of the other type families you mentioned. If it weren't for all the small, independent type companies out there Monotype would be dangerously close to becoming a monopoly.

[meh67]

Monotype "dangerously close to becoming a monopoly"....

... you mean like Adobe?

Listen, I think you are missing my point, and I did get a little side-tracked just because of how this entire thing upsets me. If Adobe is going to no longer support a specific kind of typeface that designers have been using for a long, loooong time. (I graduated college in 1991 and have been using/purchasing fonts for print ever since) They can at least make a way we can use our old fonts without an additional purchase of some third-party software that everything I have seen (and people have commented on above) gets spotty reviews.

If we are going to have to deal with a company that has monopolizing everything else designers need to function - they can step up and give us the benefits of that monopolization. Use their buying power to get licensing on more of the worlds classic fonts (thats not defintion - its type history 101). A lot more robust. If they want us to be locked into them (which we are, we are stuck- I would LOVE some competition for Adobe to kick them off their high horse) , they need to reciprocate. 

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't like it that support of Postscript Type 1 fonts was discontinued in Adobe's applications. I've been doing graphics work for more than 30 years; I have a pretty good collection of old T1 fonts. It sucks to see those files being de-valued.

But the writing is on the wall for the old T1 format. It's only a matter of time before other creative software companies disable T1 support in their applications. I would not be surprised if Microsoft took away the ability to install T1 fonts in Windows in upcoming releases of the OS.

Much of this has to do with Harfbuzz. It is a text shaping engine used by many software applications, web browers and even operating systems like Android and ChromeOS. Postscript Type 1 fonts are not supported by Harfbuzz. Adobe had to drop T1 support in order to incorporate Harfbuzz support into applications like InDesign.

Even if Harfbuzz wasn't a factor the T1 font format is still obsolete. There is no Unicode support in T1 fonts (that's the deal-breaker for Harfbuzz). A Type 1 font is limited to no more than 256 glyphs. That is pathetic compared to modern OpenType fonts.

When I'm considering buying a newly released type family I look at what kinds of extended character sets are included in the font files. The old T1 format required separate font files for things like native small capitals or "expert set" glyphs like ligatures or alternate characters. OpenType gets rid of that nonsense by allowing those extended character ranges to be included in the same font file. And now we have the OTF Variable format where a single font file can function like an entire type family. It resurrected concepts from the Type 1 Multiple Master format but added all the extra capabilities of OpenType. OTF Variable Fonts are already far more successful than the T1 MM format ever was.

As for Adobe being a monopoly, I don't agree with that. Heck, I have four different vector drawing apps installed on my computer: Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Affinity Designer and Inkscape. I've used others like Freehand and Canvas. Adobe's apps are definitely the most popular in professional circles. There are many other applications out there in various price points or even free. Those of us who have to handle a lot of corporate graphics file need to use Adobe's apps in order to open and edit those files accurately. Not enough marketing departments create branding assets are application agnostic. The files are often very Adobe-centric. Someone can import PDF or AI files into CorelDRAW but they could end up wasting lots of time repairing the artwork due to unpredictable things that happen when opening the art in a non-native environment.