A Multi-part Font Disquisition
Page 3

Legend

If necessary, click the disclose arrow next to the area identified as legend. Refer back to figure 1 if you need help locating this area. Legend is divided into two sections one each below the source fonts and destination fonts list. Both areas provide you information about the font selected that may include name, type, encoding, manufacturer, and platform.

Preferences

For the most part, you can use TransType in exactly this manner. Launch it, follow the steps listed under the quick-start heading, and you will have a set of converted fonts ready for install. The preferences provide additional control that may be needed in certain instances. The user's guide is a great source of information about all of the features of TransType, so I'm not going to try to cover everything here, but I will cover the first few entries.

General

TransType offers control over how resulting conversions will be named. You may add a suffix to a resulting Macintosh file. One option is .suit for a suitcase of fonts, but you may a suffix here and it will be added after the font name.

Figure 7 Defaults provides for the destination of converted fonts.

Defaults

In figure 7 above, the preferences dialogue box for saving resulting files is shown. Define that you wish to choose a destination each time you perform a conversion, save in the same folder as the source fonts, or predefine a folder to use each time. Additionally, you can choose to save each font family to an individual folder.

 

In defaults > codepages & scripts, choose the font encoding default for both the Mac and Windows converted fonts as shown in figure 8a and 8b. If you need more information on encodings, refer to the Font Encoding sidebar at the close of this article. Click here to access a site that I have found to be useful.

Figure 8a Choose a default setting for the Windows encodings.

Figure 8b Choose a default setting for the Mac encodings.

Figure 8c While you set the default for encodings in the preferences dialogue, you can choose another format from the drop-down menu that appears in the destination font pane.

The collection of characters used to write a particular language is the script. The alphabet (as North Americans and English know it) is the script for the English language, Latin script is the script for most European, South-American, and some Asian languages. Cyrillic script is used in all Slavonic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and many others). Note that a script usually includes many more characters than necessary for the one language. Latin script, for example, includes more than 200 characters. Using defaults q codepages & scripts, you can set as default the script used during conversion. This is shown in figure 9.

Figure 9 The script is the “alphabet” of the font.

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