Question directed to text font specialists – SOLVED

Dorico
1

Greetings to all,

This is a question directed to text font specialists.

Recently, I purchased a font with the intent to use it for different applications, amongst which Dorico. The font is called ‘Avenir Next Pro’, supplied by myfonts.com. To save money, I purchased the a basic family pack, which contains 8 font weights, each with their italic variant.

In Adobe InDesign (and Illustrator), all font weights are displayed as separate items, and can be selected directly. All other programs I tested display only 6 of 8 font weights (see attachment ‘fonts’). In those programs, font weight ‘demi’ is obtained by selecting font weight ‘regular’ and applying font style bold, font weight ‘bold’ is obtained by selecting font weight ‘medium’ and applying font style bold. This works fine in MS Word and in MuseScore. But in Dorico, there’s an issue with font weight ‘bold’. It doesn’t display correctly on screen, and neither is it printed correctly on paper. With ‘correct’ I mean in proportion to the other font weights (see attachment ‘Dorico’).

I contacted the helpdesk of myfonts.com. They couldn’t reconstruct the problem in Dorico, since they don’t have access to the program. Anyway, they assumed the problem was situated within Dorico. I had my doubts, since while testing, I encountered the same problem in Sibelius (see attachment ‘Sibelius’).

In my search for a situation which the helpdesk would be able to reconstruct, I again encountered the same problem, this time in MS Excel (see attachment ‘Excel’ in next message). I know, Excel is not the best program to test font usage. But what I discovered was quite interesting: font weight ‘bold’ wasn’t displayed correctly on screen and wasn’t printed correctly on paper. When printing to pdf (with an Adobe printer driver) it wasn’t displayed correctly in the resulting pdf-file. But when I chose to export to pdf, the font weight ‘bold’ was displayed correctly in the resulting pdf-file, and was printed correctly on paper when printing from Adobe Acrobat to printer.

When I reported this to the helpdesk, they tested in Excel, but the answer was that on their system the font weights were performing normally.

I’ve tried ttf-files instead of otf-files. I also tested on a laptop with Windows 10 and another laptop with Windows 7. All with the same result: all font files seem to be installed correctly, but font weight ‘bold’ does not perform as expected in Excel and in Sibelius (I couldn’t test Dorico on laptop, for obvious reasons).

I’m surprised that MS Word and MuseScore are able to display the font weight ‘bold’ (see attachments ‘Word’ and ‘MuseScore’ in next message), and Dorico and Sibelius can’t.

Since I’d like to use font weight ‘bold’ for titles in Dorico, I’d really like to have this issue resolved.

Does anyone have an idea what could be the cause of this issue?

Thanks in advance for your reply!

Kind regards,

Stefaan

fonts.jpg
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Dorico.jpg
Sibelius.jpg

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extra attachments

Excel.jpg
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Word.jpg
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MuseScore.jpg

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one more attachment: InDesign

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InDesign.jpg730×381 58.8 KB

4

Can you please list the exact names of the font files that you have purchased?

Unfortunately this kind of problem is not uncommon on Windows, which has a pretty rudimentary way of handling fonts. Windows gives special treatment to Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic, and in general these four styles will get folded together into a single entry in the font list, e.g. “Avenir Next Pro”, with the four weights obtained by way of the B and I buttons for bold and italic. Regular is the weight you get when neither bold nor italic is enabled, Bold is the weight you get when only bold is enabled, Bold Italic is the weight you get when both bold and italic are enabled, and Italic is the weight you get when only italic is enabled.

Fonts that fall outside of this naming scheme, e.g. Medium, Semibold, etc., will instead appear as wholly different families in the font list on Windows. So you would normally see “Avenir Next Pro” as a single entry, corresponding to regular, italic, bold, and bold italic, then a single entry for “Avenir Pro Medium”, from which you can also obtain “Avenir Pro Medium Italic” by activating the italic button.

If “Avenir Next Pro Bold” isn’t appearing correctly, it will very likely be because of the way one or more of the name fields in the font software is set up, so that Windows cannot correctly identify it as the bold weight of “Avenir Next Pro Regular”.

5

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for replying!

Here’s a list of the font file names, from lightest font weight to heaviest font weight:
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-UltLt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-UltLtIt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Thin.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-ThinIt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Light.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-LightIt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Regular.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-It.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Medium.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-MediumIt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Demi.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-DemiIt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Bold.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-BoldIt.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-Heavy.otf
Linotype - AvenirNextLTPro-HeavyIt.otf

As I mentioned in my post, font weight Demi is obtained by selecting font weight Regular and enabling bold (B button), and font weight Bold is obtained by selecting font weight Medium and enabling bold.

So, if I understand your reply correctly, there might be some name confusion since the font weight which is named ‘Bold’ is not the bold variant of font weight ‘Regular’ (as is normally the case) but of font weight ‘Medium’?

If so, is there a way I can edit the name fields of the font files ‘inside’ the font files, and would that be a solution to this problem?

Kind regards,

Stefaan

6

Hi Daniel,

I managed to solve the problem. Font weight Demi was defined as a subcategory of font weight Regular, and font weight Bold was defined as a subcategory of font weight Medium. I downloaded a font editing program and changed the nomenclature of font weights Demi and Bold so that now they are defined as ‘independent’ font weights. This worked: all programs now display a list of 8 font weights (see attachment for the list in Dorico).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Kind regards,

Stefaan
Dorico2.jpg

7

Great, I’m glad you’re sorted out now. Do beware that when you send projects to other people who have the Avenir Next Pro fonts, they won’t see the same results as you because they won’t have your modified font names. However you should be OK provided you export PDFs using Dorico’s built-in PDF export, which will embed the fonts.