Found this on the Adobe TV web site. So I'm going to see if i can figure out how to embed video here.

 

 

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In the previous DesignGeek, I thought I had written up all the "YouTubes for DesignGeeks" I had been bookmarking for the last few months.

This morning as I was clearing out my bookmark slush-pile, I found one more. Can't believe I forgot to include it, it's one of my favorites (you may have been one of the 330,000 plus who have already seen it).

Caution: The sound track is from Quentin Tarantino's movie, Pulp Fiction, so there's STRONG language! Turn down your audio first if there are people around who might not appreciate it.

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Any InDesign user who has ever needed to change the fonts used in a publication knows this frustration: Neither of the two find/change font features in InDesign (Edit > Find/Change and Type > Find Font) can access the fonts specified in Paragraph or Character styles. You have to edit each style individually to change its font spec -- an onerous task if you're dealing with twenty bazillion style definitions.

A little over a year ago I wrote about a method that made the task of converting a publication's fonts slightly more tolerable by combining Find Font with Redefine Style:

Find/Change in InDesign Style Sheets
http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/dgarchives/designgeek35.php

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An "alert reader" (apologies to Dave Barry) e-mailed me a few days ago about an out-of-date link on my Managing OS X Fonts resources page on my web site:
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/fonts-osx.html

He said that the link I titled "World's Best Forum Post: How to Prune Unnecessary OS X Fonts," which I found last year on an Apple Discussions board, had been updated by the author with info on Tiger and moved to a new location on Apple's web site.

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Someone on a listserv I subscribe to asked if anyone knew of a font that contained credit card logos. After a bit of Google searching I found one that was linked to by numerous web sites.

Rick Mueller's True Type font, Credit Card.ttf, can be downloaded from his specialty font portfolio site here ($5 shareware fee):
http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers/mueller/a_f.htm

One of the Google hits that linked to Rick's font, DaFont.com, caught my eye. It looked like a handy resource for finding other fonts, so I added it to my "Font Finder" bookmark collection. DaFont is available in French or English here:
http://www.dafont.com

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Anyone who's ever tried designing a web site or any sort of screen-based presentation knows how difficult it is to come up with good-looking text styling that works cross-browser and cross-platform.

Web designer/designgeek Marko Dugonjic came up with a neat web application that will save you hours of time. TypeTester (free) lets you compare how various sizes and styles of "web-safe" fonts (Arial, Times, Georgia, etc.), OS standard fonts, and any additional fonts active in your system will look on screen:

TypeTester
http://typetester.maratz.com/

In each of three side-by-side columns, you use convenient drop-down menus to choose a typeface and its CSS attributes such as size, leading, decoration, color, and background. Your choices are immediately applied to sample placeholder text below the settings area.

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In case you've been busy working instead of surfing the web and reading non-essential things, you might have missed the fact that Quark has created a "public beta" of QuarkXPress 7.0 available to anyone who feels like testing it out.

It's free, it's fully enabled (yes you can print from it), and you don't need to own any previous version of QuarkXPress to run it. But since it's a beta -- a close-to-final test version -- expect a bit of bugginess and crashiness. It's not meant for actual production work at all, just testing. The beta expires on March 31, 2006, which hopefully means the official release will follow shortly thereafter.

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Almost a full year ago, I wrote a DesignGeek story about how to edit screen font suitcases in OS X:
http://designgeek.com/designgeek31.php

I said there were two choices: Morrison Software's FontDoctor, and <ack> Font/DA Mover 4.1, old old Macintosh system software that runs in Classic.

Both solutions are still viable ... but let's leave Font/DA Mover behind, shall we? I can't remember the last time I booted Classic. Luckily, FontDoctor is up to version 7 and is available for Windows, too. The Mac version costs $69.99 and the Windows version only $49.99, for some reason:
http://morrisonsoftdesign.com/with_fl/index-1.html

But what I find exciting is that Insider Software, the makers of the highly-regarded font management utility, FontAgent Pro, came out with their own Suitcase Editor a couple weeks ago:

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Yes, ladies and gentlemen, once again it's time to clean out some of the backlog of sites I've bookmarked as fodder for DesignGeek articles. If you're a relatively new subscriber, you might have missed the first time I did this:

The First Occasional Bookmarks Issue (#32, 11/24/04):
http://designgeek.com/designgeek32.php

The basic idea is that instead of spending a lot of time developing a DesignGeek article on one or two of these sites, I'm just going to list a bunch of them with a few notes explaining why I thought it was bookmark-worthy. Then I can delete it from my bookmarks utility and move on.

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Okay, so far this issue I've written one story about fonts on Macs, and one about fonts on Windows. Let's close the circle and talk about making the twain meet: Converting your fonts so they work on both platforms in your mixed-platform workplace.

You probably already know that the answer is Open Type, right? It's the only cross-platform font format that is immune to slight kerning and tracking differences when used in the same document but different platforms. If you're not clear on exactly what Open Type is about, learn all about it on my Open Type Resources page:
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/opentype.html

Yes, you can upgrade to the Open Type versions of the True Type and Type 1 fonts you already own -- assuming they're available -- and benefit from the additional glyphs (characters) that are often included with them. You'll have to purchase an upgrade for each typeface family.

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