Adobe fonts question

Hi Steve,

it's not that Google Fonts is not able to provide an overview of glyphs of a particular font.

The issue is that not all glyphs are shown in that overview. Let's look after the GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO glyph in Noto Sans for example. It's simply not listed:

But Noto Sans from Google Fonts indeed has that glyph.

Here installed and accessed through a Document fonts folder with InDesign:

And thank you very much for your article you linked to!

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

My studio works on tons of STEM-govt materials that require a lot of math symbols.

We can't live without the Noto series of fonts from Google Fonts:  https://www.google.com/get/noto/ .

• Most of the world's languages have dedicated fonts (and more will be forthcoming),
• Most have a fairly robust character set, including many math symbols,
• Noto's 2 symbols fonts complete the math symbols.
• Dingbats galore.
• And emojis.
• Noto Sans and matching Sans Serifs in a complete set of weights.

Use a font manager like Linotype's Font Explorer X (mac and win) to see the glyph sets, kerning pairs, etc.

• Basic Noto Sans has 2187 chacters and 18,679 kerning pairs (yeowza!).
• Noto Sans Symbols has 561 characters.
• Noto Sans Symbols 2 has 1049 characters.

All Google Fonts can be embedded into PDFs, EPUBs, and other digital media without additional licensing fees.

I can't design today's digital (and accessible) materials without Noto.

Source Sans/Serif is also a great Google font family, but has limited weights, smaller character set (1296), fewer foreign languages, and only the basic math symbols.

The absolute best math font is Arial Unicode MS, a special version with 30,000+ characters. But Microsoft lost its license/contract with Linotype to distribute it with Windows and MS programs a few years ago and that old license can no longer be installed on computers. But you can purchase it from Linotype at https://www.linotype.com/817676/arial-unicode-ms-regular-product.html. 

But remember, most commercial font foundries today are giving you a cheap desktop font (view it on your computer screen and print it to your personal desktop printer), but you'll pay additional licensing fees to embed it into PDFs, EPUBs, and other digital media.

And those licensing fees are charged per font weight, per document/ per edition of the document, and per year. One foundry quoted a government client $40,000 per year for a set of 4 weights of a font that looked very close to Times New Roman (says this former typesetter). So close, we swapped the font with TNR and saved taxpayers a few bucks.

We blog about this every year or so: https://www.pubcom.com/blog/2019_12-06/font-licenses.shtml 

Jonathan said: "We can't buy fonts due to licensing, would like adobe font options?"

Hi Jonathan,

do you mean licensing costs? Then I would only use Google Fonts that are not variable ones.

You get the font files from that repository and you'll get no surprise if font foundries that now work with Adobe quit their contracts in the future. That happend a couple of years ago.

You have to invest some time to inspect downloaded fonts because Google does not provide an overview of the full range of glyphs for a particular font, I think. Hm. For Greek you could do a filtered list for example:

https://fonts.google.com/?subset=greek-ext

Ok. Math symbols is a different issue. But you can help yourself if you type all math symbols from Arial Unicode using the Glyphs panel in InDesign and copy the result to the Google Font's Custom Preview Text field like that ( don't know if that link will work ) :

https://fonts.google.com/?subset=greek-ext&preview.text=%2B%3C%3D%3E%7C~%C2%AC%C2%B1%C3%97%C3%B7%CF%B6%D8%86%D8%87%D8%88%E2%81%84%E2%86%90%E2%86%91%E2%86%92%E2%86%93%E2%86%94%E2%88%82%E2%88%86%E2%88%8F%E2%88%91%E2%88%92%E2%88%99%E2%88%9A%E2%88%9E%E2%88%9F%E2%88%A9%E2%88%AB%E2%89%88%E2%89%A0%E2%89%A1%E2%89%A4%E2%89%A5%E2%8C%A0%E2%8C%A1%E2%99%AF&preview.text_type=custom&preview.size=32

Illustrated the process from my German InDesign in three steps:

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

You didn't let us know what platform you're working on. If you're on a Macintosh, it's pretty easy to find which fonts you have installed have the glyph you need using the Character Viewer. See the article I wrote for InDesign Secrets / Creative Pro a few years ago (still works):

https://creativepro.com/find-font-glyph/

Check out MathType

https://docs.wiris.com/en/mathtype/office_tools/adobe_indesign