Monotype and other fonts

Is it just me or do others have problems using any font other than the basic fonts that come with Hype. The “all fonts” option only shows about a third of the fonts installed on my two computers.

Today I spent $31 and about $100 worth of labor trying to make 3 downloaded Monotype fonts work?
Waiting for an answer from Fonts.com, we shall see on that. In their documentation, they refer to cleaning the fonts cache if there are problems., but that requires yet another software app with no guarantee it will work.

I hate to try spending more money by trying the Google font system, but will if I have to.

I would like to avoid all of that webfont css stuff if I can. already getting overwhelmed with all of the custom css and javascript workarounds that are starting to dominate the forum. I realize they are needed, but I’m too busy to learn Javascript.

For display lettering I more often than not use other apps, ArtText2, Pixelmator, even Text Edit to set up my type formatting. Those apps show all of my fonts which are installed on my computers.

For the display type using the typefaces that I referred to (Art Text2 and Pixelmator) I just import a .png image, I know it will work even though they can be 100kb in size. But no fuss, no muss, it just works.

Often I can directly cut and paste text from Text Edit and it works well in Hype’s text editor. But not always.

What am i missing? have been through the documentation. Give me your experience, is the Google program worth a try?

Have you tried the browse and upload options in the “Add More Fonts…” select dropdown

Thanks, DBear for replying.

Yes, I have tried both methods. In the Hype Typography feature, I can only see the Hype default listing plus 3 other fonts that I added back in Hype 1.5. I have never been able to add any more since that point, have tried many times.

I also tried uploading the Monotype fonts which I bought from Fonts.com. The first thing that I noticed is that they require the fonts to be uploaded in a Zip file, which I did try on 3 occasions. In each case, when I did that I then got a message back saying that the font files needed to be uploaded in WOFF format. I found a converter app from a developer by the name of Andrew Sun. It appeared to work, after the conversions were made, click his app Download button, the downloads never happened in every case.

However I have solved it by the following method, which works well. I don’t need to do image type now by this method.

I confirmed that the three fonts appeared in Font Book. If they do, all I need to do is set up all of my type in Text Edit. This appears to be true for ALL fonts that appear in Apples Font Book. That seems to be the key. At that point, insert Hype Text item, cut and paste the text from Text Edit, and everything works very nicely, color can be edited in the Inspector, etc. Everything appears in the Hype Text Html dialogue box. I have tried several other odd fonts that appear in Font Book, and they all work.

So I guess, as a Feature Request, I would like to see Font Book as a source in the Hype “Add More Fonts” dialogue box.

Webfonts are a pretty complex beast. Here’s some of the considerations made for why Hype doesn’t have direct access to the system font panel:

  • Needing to restrict the set of fonts used (without downloading) to a common set that will work across all platforms/devices. Offering the system fonts would display for the current user, but if another machine doesn’t have them then they will not see it correctly.
  • If we had an easy way to take a system font and create the code for using it as a downloadable webfont, it still probably wouldn’t work on a lot of browsers because you might need the woff, ttf, svg, etc. fonts for full compatibility.
  • Webfont names are often different than their desktop font names in weird ways (’.SFNSDisplay-Regular’ is San Francisco!)
  • Webfonts have different licensing that desktop fonts. So just because you have a font installed and paid for on your machine doesn’t mean you are licensed to use it in a web context (and providers are pretty uptight about this!)

So the situation is not great. There’s some ideas we have to make it better, but the base level to help users was restricting the font list and then adding providers like fonts.com and google fonts, while still allowing inputting custom CSS.

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I understand.

I know you guys well enough to know that if there was a better solution, you would have had it.

My workaround works fine, just some added steps, in the overall scheme of things, not a big deal

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