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Inspiring
December 9, 2016
Question

Experience with free fonts? Entypo

  • December 9, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 524 views

Hi everyone,

I have a question about your experience with free fonts. This feels like a risk to me, but a coworker would like to use Entypo for caution and note icons, in place of using tables with real icons.

Can you please share your experience with this, good or bad?

Are there issues over time with unsupported fonts?

Embedding issues?

Operating system upgrade issues?

FrameMaker upgrade issues?

Acrobat upgrade issues?

I want to be sure that we are not creating more future problems than what we are trying to solve.

Thank you!

Diane

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1 reply

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Community Expert
December 9, 2016

My answer relies on my own personal views: after 30 years of layout, that's a risk I've chosen never to take on. There are so many other things to manage in long document layout that I've made a deliberate decision to avoid trouble when and where I can that includes taking a risk on fonts.

I'm curious what others will have to say.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
Bob_Niland
Community Expert
Community Expert
December 9, 2016

I presume that what's sought here is the alert glyph /!\ in that private-use-space font.

Doing ANSI and ISO admonishments that way risks:
a. not being strictly compliant with the applicable safety standards, and
b. having the alert glyph be trashed/invisible in random workflows

Doing it as text was discussed previously here, and I see that the glyph is already trashed to a hex box there. Note also the reference to the separate discussion about safety colors.

In a previous position, we did it as an EPS vector banner, with vectorized outlined text, coming in from a Reference Page as a Frame-Above.

In FM2015, I would do it the same way, but with the graphic being SVG, so that it flows into HTML and XML workflows cleanly (hopefully).

Inspiring
December 9, 2016

Hi Bob - the Entypo font is a symbol font (like Symbol, except that it has the symbols we need). That being said - would you still be concerned about color? The font takes on whatever color I tell it just as any other font. I'm not defending the idea of using the free font, just checking my facts before I discuss with my manager.

Thanks for the information!