Font size Mac vs PC

THE QUICK ANSWER:

If you have exactly the same font files installed on both Macintosh and Windows – and open an InDesign file that uses those fonts on either system – your layout should typeset identically. That’s even the case when you switch versions of InDesign, allowing for a few rare exceptions.

The chances are very likely that the ITC Franklin Gothic font files installed on your new Windows system are not the same as those on your old Macintosh.

If you are the decision-maker at your newspaper – and everyone working on the files also have active subscriptions to Creative Cloud and Adobe Fonts – switching from ITC Franklin Gothic to Halyard is an excellent choice:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/halyard

Alternatively, you can use ATF Franklin Gothic instead:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/atf-franklin-gothic

An open-source option – also available for direct download on Google Fonts – is Libre Franklin:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/libre-franklin
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Libre+Franklin

THE MORE DETAILED ANSWER:

If your InDesign layout’s typesetting is changing from five columns of text to four-and-a-half, that’s a big difference (≈10%). This is clear evidence that the versions of ITC Franklin Gothic you have installed on your old Macintosh and new Windows systems are different.

The Franklin Gothic typefaces have a long and complicated history.

There are many different interpretations, formats, and versions of the original design, which was first published by American Type Founders starting around 1900. The original Franklin Gothic represents the heaviest weight of ATF’s extensive gothic typeface families, alongside other typefaces like News Gothic (ATF’s regular weights).

One of the most popular contemporary interpretations of the original Franklin Gothic is ITC’s version, released around 1980. ITC Franklin Gothic includes a wide range of weights, and was later extended to include different widths. The ITC fonts available on the Adobe Fonts service today are only the condensed widths:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/itc-franklin-gothic

If you’re wondering why the standard widths aren’t available on Adobe Fonts, it’s because Monotype only makes select fonts available on the service.

Monotype – ITC’s current owner – has their own competing font subscription service. This is where you can find the entire ITC Franklin Gothic typeface family. The same applies to other popular Monotype typefaces on Adobe Fonts: if the typeface is available at all, there’s a chance that only part of the typeface will be available.

If you really need to license the complete original ITC Franklin Gothic, you’ll find it on Monotype’s website:

https://www.fonts.com/font/itc/itc-franklin-gothic-lt

Based upon this entire forum thread, it sounds like you may have been using ITC Franklin Gothic Std on your old Macintosh. The subtle hint: InDesign’s ‘Find Font’ feature is identifying the version of the font in your original layout as OpenType-format with PostScript Type 1 font data.

The Adobe Type Group originally digitized both the ATF and ITC Franklin Gothic typefaces for their Type Library back in the 1980s; these fonts were first licensed in the PostScript Type 1 format. In the early 2000s, the entire Adobe Type Library was converted to OpenType format, still using the original Type 1 font data. Thus the confusing ‘OpenType Type 1’ description in InDesign. ATF’s ‘Franklin Gothic’ became ‘Franklin Gothic Std’, and ‘ITC Franklin Gothic’ became ‘ITC Franklin Gothic Std’.

To complicate matters: fonts from the original Adobe Type Library are no longer available for direct licensing. A couple of months ago, Adobe stopped selling licences for Font Folio, which included the version of ITC Franklin Gothic that you probably need.

To complicate matters even further: sometimes, operating systems come with certain fonts installed by default. Apple doesn’t include ITC Franklin Gothic with macOS, but Microsoft does with Windows. It’s something that Microsoft has done for years, ever since they used the typeface extensively for the graphic identity of Windows 95, NT, 2000, XP, plus all of the Office applications of the same era (≈1995–2005).

Since you’re now opening your InDesign layout on a Windows machine, there’s a good chance that the pink highlighting you’re seeing is because InDesign wants the OpenType version of ITC Franklin Gothic with PostScript Type 1 font data. What InDesign finds instead is the OpenType version with TrueType font data, which is already installed on Windows’ system font folder.

InDesign knows the difference, panics, and correctly identifies your system as having a different version of ITC Franklin Gothic with different metrics and spacing information. And when you tell InDesign to use the version of the font native to Windows, it re-typesets the text – and five columns of text changes to four-and-a-half columns. What we can conclude: Windows’ native version of the font has slightly more condensed letterforms and spacing.

What can you do at this point? If you have to collaborate with other people – some on Macintoshes, and others on Windows – continuing to use ITC Franklin Gothic will become a never-ending problem. Any typeface installed natively on an operating system – think: Helvetica or Times New Roman – is always going to get in the way, and always at the most inconvenient times.

Your best solution is to switch to any typeface that you know absolutely isn’t installed as a default operating system font on either Macintosh or Windows. In certain cases, using the exact same typeface with a different name is good enough to avoid grief. A good example is Neue Haas Grotesk, which is a digital revival of the very original metal version of Helvetica:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/neue-haas-grotesk

Another interpretation of Helvetica from the heydays of phototypesetting in the 1970s is the newly-digitized release of Neue Haas Unica:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/neue-haas-unica

So there are ways to get around the problem of operating system fonts and commonly-used typeface names.

If you’re looking for differently-named interpretations of Franklin Gothic, there are three extensive families currently available on Adobe Fonts:

ATF Franklin Gothic (American Type Founders)
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/atf-franklin-gothic

Libre Franklin (Impallari Type)
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/libre-franklin

URW Franklin Gothic (URW Type)
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/franklin-gothic-urw

But I notice that you’ve already discovered Joshua Darden’s Halyard typeface family, which is an excellent alternative to Franklin Gothic:

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/halyard

Joshua – and the team that he worked with on the Halyard typeface family – produce technically-excellent fonts. Joshua and I had a long discussion at one of the first meetings of the New York InDesign User Group back in 2001–2002, and I found him to be highly knowledgeable about typographic history and font production. Halyard is a good example of his work.

Halyard is based on 19th- and 20th-century gothic and grotesque typefaces like Franklin Gothic. Those original typefaces were cast in metal, and their letterforms varied slightly from size to size. This was deliberate: smaller sizes need optimized letterforms with built-in ink traps to ensure that the text prints legibly. I have a letterpress type specimen of Franklin Gothic in front of me as I type this: the visual differences between the 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, 14-, 24-, 36-, and 60-point letterforms are obvious.

A major advantage of Halyard over other gothic typefaces is that it has three distinct optical size designs: one for display sizes (18+ pt), a second for text sizes (8–18 pt), and a third for caption sizes (4–8 pt). If you look at Halyard Micro, the ink traps are quite visible. If you need to typeset type at 8 points and below, these ink traps will ensure that the text will still be readable, even when using newsprint-quality paper on the printing press.

If you’re just producing printed work, PDF files, and websites – and everyone you work with also subscribes to Creative Cloud and Adobe Fonts – then you should be able to use Halyard without any extra licensing. If you need more special licensing – such as using Halyard as part of a smartphone application – then you’ll need to contact Darden Studio directly:

https://www.dardenstudio.com/contact

My sense is that Halyard is an excellent replacement for ITC Franklin Gothic in your newspaper layout. Its design derives from the same letterforms, it has three optical sizes, it has a better range of weights, and it also supports a much wider range of languages that use the Latin alphabet.

I’d recommend experimenting with both the Text and Micro optical sizes of Halyard on your 8-point text. 8 points is typically a borderline case for picking between text and caption types; you may find that one gives you better results at the printing press. Having that flexibility is a great advantage, because there are very few digital gothic and grotesque typefaces available today that have multiple optical sizes.

I hope that answers your question. If not, please let me know.

Best regards
Andrew

–30–

Are you referring to monitor scale? Assuming cross-platform fonts, the ID document wouldn't change.

How do you know they're smaller? How are you measuring it? Sounds like a scaling issue somewhere.

How did you move to windows? Did you simply open the older files or did you do any kind of conversion process? copying and pasting, resizing?