On the site I’m developing I’m at a point where I’m trying to use some different fonts and I’m experimenting.
When I first selected “other” from the font drop down menu in the text inspector for my html box, and the Edit Font Set dialog box came up that led to a few questions.
The Screen font: drop menu showed Times. What does Screen font mean? I don’t think I’m using Times anywhere in the site
When I then look at the menu and pick, e.g., Helvetica Neue, there’s a sub-menu for that with what I assume is the whole family of Helvetica Neue – 11 variations. Regardless of which of those variations I pick, In the “Alternative fonts: (eg Helvetica,Arial…)” text box, only Helvetica Neue appears, not Light or Light Italic if I pick those. My question here is, if I pick Regular from the Helvetica Neue sub-menu, and Helvetica appears in the text box, is the whole family available to me, and if so, how do I access the different members of the family? Because after clicking OK in the Edit Font Set dialog, only Helvetica Neue appears in the drop down menu in the text inspector.
Before I realized I could set the name of the font set, I left the default name of Font Set 1, Font Set 2, etc in the Name field of the Edit Font Set dialog. Now I have a bunch of them like that in the drop down menu in the text inspector. Is there any way I can remove them?
And finally,
in the Edit Font Set dialog box, in the Alternative fonts: text box, which is editable, as an experiment I typed in “Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica Neue Light” and named it Helvetica Set. Now Helvetica Set shows up in the drop down menu in the text inspector, but the actual fonts that I included in the set aren’t there. This leads me to see that I don’t really understand what the significance of the Alternative fonts: text box is. Could someone explain it to me?
I’d like to ask question 3 again. I’d really like to get rid of all these additions I made to the font drop down menu in the text inspector
Hi Martin,
Font Sets aren’t single fonts but a collection of fonts that you want your page to use and in the order they are defined in the list. Although there are a limited number of ‘web safe’ fonts available (fonts that all Mac, Windows, and other OS’s share) there is nothing from stopping you from specifying the ideal font for the job in your set and then fall back to a second, third, and even fourth choice of font should these not be installed.
The ‘Screen font’ is what Freeway will show you in the design view when you are designing your site. Typically this is the same as the first font specified in the set but doesn’t have to be. If you want to see what a user will see if they don’t have the primary font in the set installed simply set the screen font to the second font in the list and Freeway will reflow your pages using this font. This is great for testing and allows you to see how your pages will flow depending on what fonts are used.
Here’s a good overview of font sets (they call them stacks); unitinteractive.com
In answer to question 3 and 5 you can delete sets simply by selecting Font Sets from the Edit menu, selecting the set you want to remove and press the Delete button.
I’d encourage you to experiment with your font sets as they are quite powerful and allow you to specify the exact fonts you want in your pages, knowing that the 95% of people that don’t have that font will fall back to one of a set of more common fonts.
Regards,
Tim.
In addition to this, we’ve also got some example font sets/stacks listed on our KnowledgeBase. They are all Mac, Windows and Linux friendly:
Joe
On 13 Jan 2011, at 11:40, Tim Plumb wrote:
Hi Martin,
Font Sets aren’t single fonts but a collection of fonts that you want your page to use and in the order they are defined in the list. Although there are a limited number of ‘web safe’ fonts available (fonts that all Mac, Windows, and other OS’s share) there is nothing from stopping you from specifying the ideal font for the job in your set and then fall back to a second, third, and even fourth choice of font should these not be installed.
The ‘Screen font’ is what Freeway will show you in the design view when you are designing your site. Typically this is the same as the first font specified in the set but doesn’t have to be. If you want to see what a user will see if they don’t have the primary font in the set installed simply set the screen font to the second font in the list and Freeway will reflow your pages using this font. This is great for testing and allows you to see how your pages will flow depending on what fonts are used.
Here’s a good overview of font sets (they call them stacks); unitinteractive.com
In answer to question 3 and 5 you can delete sets simply by selecting Font Sets from the Edit menu, selecting the set you want to remove and press the Delete button.
I’d encourage you to experiment with your font sets as they are quite powerful and allow you to specify the exact fonts you want in your pages, knowing that the 95% of people that don’t have that font will fall back to one of a set of more common fonts.
Regards,
Tim.
Thank you so much for this introduction into what’s going on with typography in Freeway and the web in general. The link you supplied is brilliant. I’ve only read a fraction of it thus far and am going back immediately after I send this off to read it thoroughly.
One question arose immediately when I read this paragraph:
“When creating a stack, first consider the context of the text. Is it going to be a headline, sub-head, or body copy? This can determine the appropriate order of a stack, considering certain fonts work well for setting blocks of copy, while others work better at larger sizes. For example, Helvetica’s nuances work well on screen, when the text is large enough, while Helvetica Neue’s slightly wider letter forms read better at smaller sizes on screen. Arial reads slightly better than Helvetica at smaller sizes on the screen, as well. Therefore, your font stack for Helvetica may need to be different depending on whether it is used for body copy or a page title.”
Does this mean, which I think it does, using his example, that I would create two stacks, one perhaps beginning with Helvetica for headlines and one beginning with Helvetica Neue for smaller type? Though I guess this isn’t a very good example because Helvetica is web safe anyway so you wouldn’t need a stack for it. Nevertheless, is this the principle that is operative here?
And I’m still not clear about my question no. 2:
When I then look at the menu and pick, e.g., Helvetica Neue, there’s a sub-menu for that with what I assume is the whole family of Helvetica Neue – 11 variations. Regardless of which of those variations I pick, In the “Alternative fonts: (eg Helvetica,Arial…)” text box, only Helvetica Neue appears, not Light or Light Italic if I pick those. My question here is, if I pick Regular from the Helvetica Neue sub-menu, and Helvetica appears in the text box, is the whole family available to me, and if so, how do I access the different members of the family? Because after clicking OK in the Edit Font Set dialog, only Helvetica Neue appears in the drop down menu in the text inspector.
Can you enlighten me a little on this?
Again, thanks so much for your response. It has certainly steered me in the right direction to start learning about this.
I guess I found the answer to this question in the KB article Joe referred me to and in another link in the unitinteractive article. Many of these fonts work well for both titles and smaller type.
Thanks,
Martin
On Jan 13, 2011, at 7:43 AM, Martin Rice wrote:
Hi, Tim:
Does this mean, which I think it does, using his example, that I would create two stacks, one perhaps beginning with Helvetica for headlines and one beginning with Helvetica Neue for smaller type? Though I guess this isn’t a very good example because Helvetica is web safe anyway so you wouldn’t need a stack for it. Nevertheless, is this the principle that is operative here?
Hi Martin,
What I would suggest is you open the Font Book application you should have on your Mac and select the font you want to add to your font set. From the Preview menu select Font Info and you’ll see a whole host of information about the font including the PostScript name. Select this name and copy it into your Font Set dialog in Freeway.
For example I just created a set called “Helvetica Ultra Light example” with the following fonts;
HelveticaNeue-UltraLightItalic, HelveticaNeue-LightItalic, HelveticaNeue-Light, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, Sans
The ‘Sans’ font is a generic font reference and is generally used as a last ditch attempt to specify a type of font to use. The browser should really never have to get to this option as the preceding option, Arial, is a web safe font and should be available to the browser.
Hi Martin,
What I would suggest is you open the Font Book application you should have on your Mac and select the font you want to add to your font set. From the Preview menu select Font Info and you’ll see a whole host of information about the font including the PostScript name. Select this name and copy it into your Font Set dialog in Freeway.
For example I just created a set called “Helvetica Ultra Light example” with the following fonts;
HelveticaNeue-UltraLightItalic, HelveticaNeue-LightItalic, HelveticaNeue-Light, HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, Sans
The ‘Sans’ font is a generic font reference and is generally used as a last ditch attempt to specify a type of font to use. The browser should really never have to get to this option as the preceding option, Arial, is a web safe font and should be available to the browser.
Just a minor clarification – in any font set based on sans-serif
fonts, the “generic” term is always
sans-serif
Just like that – lower-case and with the hyphen, and no quotes around
it. I imagine that using a different code word might work (the browser
would guess correctly), or you might never get that far (another font
would step in before you got to the last-ditch fallback), but the spec
reads sans-serif.
Walter
On Jan 13, 2011, at 8:29 AM, Tim Plumb wrote:
The ‘Sans’ font is a generic font reference and is generally used as
a last ditch attempt to specify a type of font to use. The browser
should really never have to get to this option as the preceding
option, Arial, is a web safe font and should be available to the
browser.
Yep, my mistake. Thanks for the clarification Walter.
On 13 Jan 2011, at 16:21, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
Just a minor clarification – in any font set based on sans-serif fonts, the “generic” term is always
sans-serif
Just like that – lower-case and with the hyphen, and no quotes around it. I imagine that using a different code word might work (the browser would guess correctly), or you might never get that far (another font would step in before you got to the last-ditch fallback), but the spec reads sans-serif.
