Experience with free fonts? Entypo

[dianeo25300006]

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

[Barb Binder]

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.

[Bob_Niland]

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).

[dianeo25300006]

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!

[Bob_Niland]

re: Entypo font is a symbol font (like Symbol, except that it has the symbols we need).

Where are you downloading that? All I see on the entypo dot com site is a zip of SVGs.

In any event, if it's actually an overlay/codepage font in the tradition of Symbol (replacing the Latin extension glyphs at codepoints 80h through FFh), then that's also discouraged on FM8 and later, due to stewardship issues as well as font-flow issues.

Using codepage or private_space fonts raises (among other things), the questions of whether they embed for PDF, and whether they work as web fonts in other workflows.

If FM ever supports Unicode combining characters (retreating diacriticals), we could discuss using an ordinary exclamation point and the enclosing triangle \u20E4 (and, alas, due to the existence of that codepoint, I suspect Unicode is not likely to officially adopt an ANSI/ISO Alert character).