Here’s an interesting issue that some of you may run into.
I use Arial Narrow in my Dorico 5 template. Dorico 5 sees it as a separate font family from Arial.
Dorico 6, on the other hand, sees Arial Narrow as a style of the font family Arial. Hence any Dorico 5 file I open asks to remap all those Arial Narrow instances. Annoying!
Is there a way to have Dorico 6 do this remapping every time as a preset, so it no longer asks?
Once you’ve done the mapping once, the dialog should be pre-populated with your choices when you open other projects.
From the version history PDF:
One consequence of this is that when you open existing projects for the first time in
Dorico 6, any extended weights in use in your project will be reported as missing in
the Missing Fonts dialog that appears during project opening. This dialog has been
enhanced such that each choice you make in the dialog will be remembered and
automatically populated when opening future projects, so you need make the
mapping from the old font name to the new once.
There’s a new file, fontReplacements.ini, in your user folder now too, so if you mess up and need to change something you previously selected, or want to manually copy and edit, you can check out what’s happening in that file.
Brilliant! Thanks, guys
@dspreadbury Update on this topic… Dorico 6’s font conversion and recognition is definitely not fixed. As I exchange a file with my Mac comrades, Arial Narrow and Arial Narrow Bold sometimes translates correctly, and sometimes doesn’t. I can’t make any sense of it. And yes, we’ve tried deleting the fontReplacements.ini file during troubleshooting, recreating it by doing the font dialog again. In fact, even after doing that, my Mac friend ended up having incorrect mapping in that file anyway. Sometimes, Arial Narrow comes back from a Mac as Arial Narrow (family) Narrow (style) - yes, with that redundancy. While Arial Narrow Bold comes back as Arial (family) Narrow Bold (style). And sometimes it comes back as regular Arial (non-Narrow). I’ve been unable to get consistent results, which is weird to me.
I’ve attached a file for you guys to test with. Pass it back and forth between Windows and Mac and see what I mean. There are four rehearsal boxes (created as system texts) with both Narrow and Narrow Bold within them.
Arial Narrow test file.dorico (840.6 KB)
The good news is I’ve discovered a better solution to achieving this look anyway! Instead of using the font Arial Narrow, I’m now just using Arial and utilizing Dorico’s ability to stretch/compress the font - so I just set it to %75 (compression), and it looks exactly like Arial Narrow. No issues between platforms at all.
Just checking: Are you sure that you all have the same actual fonts installed?
Yes, the idea being that it is a font common and standard in both Mac and Windows installations. So it is the default Arial Narrow in both platforms.
I thought one of the two used Helvetica rather than Arial.
Arial Narrow is defined internally as a separate font family from Arial, as shows up on the Mac as a separate item in font menus.
The same is true for Arial Black, and other Arial variants.
So I will still expect these to show up separately on Windows.
This is how Windows sees Arial:
This is how Dorico 6 sees Arial in Windows:
And for reference, this is how Dorico 5 sees Arial in Windows:
So Dorico 6 now matches how Windows sees the font, but I’m not sure the conversion of Dorico files from Windows Dorico 6 to Mac Dorico 6 and back is working properly.
@benwiggy 's post above shows that Mac sees this particular font differently. So I’m not sure that this is a good test of whether the new font handling in D6 is truly cross-platform – if the underlying OS sees things differently, then I don’t think there’s much that Dorico can do.
The D6 Version Notes says this:
BlockquoteExtended font family support on Windows. In previous versions of Dorico, font families
with multiple weights were handled quite differently between macOS and
Windows. A family like Minion Pro with multiple weights, such as Bold, Semibold,
Condensed, Bold Condensed, and so on, would appear as a single family Minion Pro
on macOS, with each of the weights listed as separate styles. On Windows, however,
styles were limited to four standard values: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic, so
font families with multiple weights would instead be listed as multiple families:
Minion Pro, Minion Pro Semibold, Minion Pro Condensed, and so on. In Dorico 6,
this limitation has been removed, and font families appear in the same way on
Windows as they always have done on macOS.
This, to me, says that they addressed the Windows/Mac discrepencies with this update. But in my case, it actually works worse that it did in Dorico 5, at least with Arial Narrow.
So I leave this with the team for their continuing development. It isn’t affecting my situation anymore since I’m now approaching my situation differently, using the standard Arial font and having Dorico compress it to match Arial Narrow.
I think it’s a little complicated, and it relies on the font files themselves being the same on both platforms (which I guess they’re not for Arial). Given a complex font (i.e., more than just regular/bold/italic/bold italic) with matching files, D5 would almost certainly have discrepancies between platforms; D6 shouldn’t.
I don’t know that there’s more that Dorico can do in this particular situation with Arial, because it has to rely on the metadata reported by the OS.
