Type geek with a type geek question.
I've installed El Capitan on my laptop. The new San Francisco fonts are loaded at /System/Library/Fonts with names starting with "SFNS". Over the last couple of days I've used the (very good BTW) Glyphs app to inspect them, and it struck me that maybe it's time to re-ask an old question.
SFNSText-Medium.otf has almost 1700 glyphs. That's a very big set of accented characters, Greek, Cyrillic, and small caps (for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic). Several other built-in fonts include small caps ... Avenir Next, Hoefler Text, Apple Chancery, and probably some others as well.
By "small caps" I mean the real article: little junior-sized capitals, drawn separately by the type designer so that their stroke widths matched their grown-up counterparts, rather than just being shrunken versions of the capitals.
These and other features (things like, say, swashes or alternate forms) are built into the font, and once upon a time programs like Apple Pages used to let you access these features through a "Typography" menu. When Pages took its leap backwards for web compatibility a few years back, away went the real small caps, and in came the faked small caps - i.e. the capital letters, just taken down 20% or so. The "Typography" menu was first hobbled, then removed.
Well, I'm a purist. I was one of the three or four people who actually installed the QuickDraw GX extensions in the mid '90s in the days of System 7 just for its extra typographic capabilities, and was happy to see those typographic features gradually work their way into OSX. If you've looked at Hoefler Text in your Font Book and seen the engraved capitals, well, you used to be able to actually *use* them. Same with all those glyph variations on Apple Chancery and Zapfino.
As it stands right now, the operating system still supports the capabilities (ATSUI/AAT) -- but applications? Not so much. In fact, I know of only two. One is the open-source XeLaTeX system, an OSX-native port of (if I'm getting the genealogy right) pdflatex. It's terrific when you really, really need the brains of the LaTeX typesetting system, but those of you who are TeXnicians know that there's a friendliness penalty involved.
The other is InDesign, which is Adobe rentware-only, so forget that. (Sell me a program and I'll buy it; tell me I can only rent it, and that my files will turn into a pumpkin at midnight if I don't keep coughing it up, and I tell you to get lost.)
So here's my question. Are there other alternatives on OSX I don't know about?
(And I suppose I have to ask: what about the latest Word for Mac? Because if Microsoft typography on a Mac is now better than Apple typography on a Mac, then the world must be coming to an end soon.)
I've installed El Capitan on my laptop. The new San Francisco fonts are loaded at /System/Library/Fonts with names starting with "SFNS". Over the last couple of days I've used the (very good BTW) Glyphs app to inspect them, and it struck me that maybe it's time to re-ask an old question.
SFNSText-Medium.otf has almost 1700 glyphs. That's a very big set of accented characters, Greek, Cyrillic, and small caps (for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic). Several other built-in fonts include small caps ... Avenir Next, Hoefler Text, Apple Chancery, and probably some others as well.
By "small caps" I mean the real article: little junior-sized capitals, drawn separately by the type designer so that their stroke widths matched their grown-up counterparts, rather than just being shrunken versions of the capitals.
These and other features (things like, say, swashes or alternate forms) are built into the font, and once upon a time programs like Apple Pages used to let you access these features through a "Typography" menu. When Pages took its leap backwards for web compatibility a few years back, away went the real small caps, and in came the faked small caps - i.e. the capital letters, just taken down 20% or so. The "Typography" menu was first hobbled, then removed.
Well, I'm a purist. I was one of the three or four people who actually installed the QuickDraw GX extensions in the mid '90s in the days of System 7 just for its extra typographic capabilities, and was happy to see those typographic features gradually work their way into OSX. If you've looked at Hoefler Text in your Font Book and seen the engraved capitals, well, you used to be able to actually *use* them. Same with all those glyph variations on Apple Chancery and Zapfino.
As it stands right now, the operating system still supports the capabilities (ATSUI/AAT) -- but applications? Not so much. In fact, I know of only two. One is the open-source XeLaTeX system, an OSX-native port of (if I'm getting the genealogy right) pdflatex. It's terrific when you really, really need the brains of the LaTeX typesetting system, but those of you who are TeXnicians know that there's a friendliness penalty involved.
The other is InDesign, which is Adobe rentware-only, so forget that. (Sell me a program and I'll buy it; tell me I can only rent it, and that my files will turn into a pumpkin at midnight if I don't keep coughing it up, and I tell you to get lost.)
So here's my question. Are there other alternatives on OSX I don't know about?
(And I suppose I have to ask: what about the latest Word for Mac? Because if Microsoft typography on a Mac is now better than Apple typography on a Mac, then the world must be coming to an end soon.)
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