Variable Fonts

[Danny Whitehead.]

So, a decade or two after the tragic demise of Multiple Master fonts, they've finally been reborn in the form of variable fonts... in Photoshop and Illustrator, but not InDesign.

I know this is more of a feature request, but is anyone else as excited about them as I am? When will we get them in InDesign? Will there be another row in the Hyphenation & Justification settings, similar to 'Glyph Scaling', that lets us define minimum and maximum widths for fonts that support it like Acumin and Myriad?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Personal opinion …

At this point, consider the implementation of the “Variable Fonts” in Illustrator and Photoshop to be experimental/exploratory.

The OpenType Variable Fonts are absolutely not supported as part of the PDF 2.0 specification and if and when such support comes, it may be a few years away. Ironically, if you do use the “concept” OpenType Variable Fonts in Illustrator and you save as PDF, what is embedded is (oy vey, hold onto your hats) something similar to Multiple Master instances of Type 1 fonts. Text formatted in such fonts is not editable in Acrobat!

t will be a while before or if this technology becomes available in InDesign and certainly before it becomes mainstream for PDF publishing workflows.

[Danny Whitehead.]

Thanks for the insight, Dov. It's nice to hear that Multiple Masters still alive somewhere, at least!

At this point would you say it's safe to use the 'Concept' fonts in real print work, for instance to create type lockups in Illustrator? Or would it be safer to convert to outlines (I know, I know, but I wouldn't be talking lots of small body text)?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

I have “played with” a number of these fonts both from Adobe and elsewhere and believe that there are tremendous possibilities once there is clear end-to-end workflow support for OpenType Variable fonts.

You can use those fonts now in real print work, but be advised that the variable fonts supplied with Adobe applications at this point are pretty much duplicated in the standard font offerings from Adobe. Plus, the current “concept fonts” are not full fonts in terms of glyph complements and are subject to change significantly by the time they are released as somthing other than “concept” fonts. For example, Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, and Acumin all have many more glyphs and OpenType features that their current “concept” brethren. Furthermore, you can't do any manipulation of the text in Acrobat after the fact.

As I previously said I would treat the “Variable Fonts” in Illustrator and Photoshop and now InDesign to be experimental/exploratory.

[Derek Cross]

Any information (or comment) Dov about Adobe implementing PDF2?

[Dov Isaacs]

Native Support of OpenType Variable fonts (both TrueType and CFF flavored) as well as OpenType SVG fonts are not part of the PDF 2.0 specification. It will probably be two years before ISO TC171 can get such support into PDF officially as a new feature. As such, Adobe support for PDF 2.0 is really irrelevant to this particular issue, for better or worse.

At Adobe, we are adding PDF 2.0 features in an incremental fashion depending upon requirements of the end-user community as well as the ability of applications to make use of those features.

Is there a particular set of PDF 2.0 features that you are most interested in? I'd be very interested in particular features and use cases you have, especially since coordinating the PDF 2.0 implementation between the generating applications, Acrobat, and Adobe's PDF OEM RIP products is one of my responsibilities here. (For better or worse, much of this is a “chicken and omelet” problem!)

[Jongware]

Does this need PDF native support because it is attempted to keep the full variablenessnessity of the fonts inside the PDFs?

Multiple Master fonts circumvented precisely this issue by embedding only the necessary instances.

[Dov Isaacs]

Native support allows for editing text within Acrobat. There are similarities to the Multiple Master scenario, but Multiple Master fonts are indeed fully supported in PDF. The base Multiple Master is embedded and there are what I will call “stubs” that call on that font with parameters as to how to use the Multiple Master font. However, the technology for OpenType Variable fonts is significantly different and as such, we can't make believe they are Multiple Master. But the ultimate technical approach is terms of how we ultimately support them in PDF will probaby be very similar.