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wrke_
Participating Frequently
October 25, 2010
Question

Adobe Garamond Expert?

  • October 25, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 5816 views

I've used AGaramond for 20 years. All of a sudden in Mac Leopard (10.5.8) AGExpert no longer works. Adobe Garamond Regular, Alternate, Titling, etc all work fine, but the Expert fonts (small caps, old-style numbers, ligatures, etc) no longer work (Expert Regular, Semi or Bold). They come up blank. In Font Book, they are all noted as Active, but the characters are blank.

Is there a solution? I know that Adobe now sells all these fonts as a family instead of how I originally purchased them. Do I have to now re-purchase the font that I have imbedded in thousands of documents?? Will the newer "family" version of Adobe Garamond (that contains all the expert and alternate characters) work, or will I continue to have problems?

Thanks.

Expert still works in 10.4.11 in most programs including Quark XPress. However, even Adobe Garamond doesn't work in Apple's Pages . . . there, it's a conglomeration of regular and strange alternate glyphs.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    T
    Thomas Phinney
    Inspiring
    October 25, 2010

    I don't know when Apple started treating the encoding of expert fonts differently, but I don't think this is going to be treated as a bug anybody will be much interested in solving. PostScript Type 1 fonts are on their way out, and expert fonts in particular are all but dead.

    The "modern" way of accessing "expert" glyphs is to reference the base glyph, plus formatting, and use an OpenType font. So instead of switching fonts you use Adobe Garamond Pro for the whole thing, and format small caps as small caps, and the application and the font take care of it. Same for say the ffi ligature. This has some real advantages, because the underlying text for "office" with an ffi ligature is still "office" instead of "oWce" which is kinda obviously better for search, spell check, or changing fonts.

    Adobe has been selling and bundling Adobe Garamond Pro for about a decade now. Its special alternate glyphs work very nicely in InDesign, Pages and QuarkXPress.

    Cheers,

    T

    Thomas Phinney

    Sr Product Mgr, Fonts & Typography

    Extensis

    W
    wrke_Author
    Participating Frequently
    October 25, 2010

    Thanks Tom

    But I did purchase Adobe Garamond Pro Regular to see if it works and

    I can't find all the characters. Using keyboard viewer I can only

    find a limited selection. the ligatures for fi and fl appear, but no

    ffi or ffl. No old-style numbers, no small caps, no titling caps, no

    fractions. How are those accessed?

    Any hints?

    Thanks very much.

    Bill

    T
    Thomas Phinney
    Inspiring
    October 26, 2010

    I have finally figured out how to add fractions in Pages using AGPro . . . limited to the few fractions that are in the glyph catalog. I assume it's not possible to do unusual fractions, say 4/5 since the glyph catalog doesn't have a 4/5 "real" fraction.

    I am still stumped using AGExpert fonts in Leopard (they still work in XPress in Tiger).

    Bill


    (Except for the earliest released version around 2000) Adobe Garamond Pro supports arbitrary fractions such as 123/1729.

    Whether the app supports fractions via formatting is another question, mind you. But even if it doesn't, you may be able to manually assemble the desired fraction using numerator and denominator glyphs from the font.

    Regards,

    T

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