Fonts, Variants

[jclements]

I don't understand why the following is happening when applying certian fonts.

I have Arial and Arial Narrow installed on my PC. They are in the Windows\Fonts folder as two separate TrueType files.

In Xara 5.1 Pro, I click on the Text tool, pick Arial from the dropdown list, click in the drawing area and type some text. Arial appears in the Used Fonts section of the Name Gallery.



Next I go to the dropdown list and pick Arial Narrow, click in the drawing area and type some text. Not only does Arial Narrow appear in the Used Fonts section BUT ALSO "Arial (all veriants)".

My understanding (incorrect understanding I guess) is that the variant denotation only should occur when you apply an attribute to a font, such as Bold, which was not native to the metrics of that TrueType font

Covoxer, or one of the programmers, can you please clarify why the Variant listing in the Used Fonts gallery and what specifically triggers it?

By the way, I did a search for "variant" in the Help File and nothing came up.

Regards, John

[wuerthne]

My understanding (incorrect understanding I guess) is that the variant denotation only should occur when you apply an attribute to a font, such as Bold, which was not native to the metrics of that TrueType font

That understanding is incorrect. What you refer to is a different issue: When you apply an attribute that is not supported by the given TrueType font, then the entry shows "(unavailable)". That is not related to the "All variants" entry.

Generally, the "All variants" entry appears as soon as you use more than one variant of a font - no matter whether these variants are available or not. So, if you use just Arial Narrow, then the "All variants" entry does not appear, but if you use both Arial Narrow and Arial Narrow Bold, then it appears, in order to allow you to select both variants in one go.

In the above case of using plain Arial and Arial Narrow, the "Arial (All variants)" entry should not appear. As you can see when you click on the circle before it, it does really refer to plain Arial only, not to Arial Narrow, so there is no point in having it.

So, to sum it up: The fact that the entry appears is a bug, but a harmless one because all entries still work as they should. It just means that some space is wasted in the Gallery.

Martin

[jclements]

Martan, thank you for your timely response.

What would be the potential usefulness of having the variant denotation in Used Fonts dialog for the user?

Could there be something about variant fonts added to the Help file. please?

Regards, John

[wuerthne]

You mean, why is the "All variants" entry there in general? As I wrote above, it allows you to select all text in the given font, no matter which variant.

So, if you have some text in Arial and some in Arial Bold, then you have the following entries in the Used Fonts section:
Arial
Arial Bold
Arial (all variants)

Clicking on the circle next to the first entry selects all text in plain Arial, clicking on the second selects text in Arial Bold only and the third one selects both, i.e., all text in Arial, no matter whether it is bold or italic or not. So, each of these entries is useful in its own right.

[jclements]

Got it. Thanks.

[antimix]

Hi,

I think this *feature* come out to the programmers as an attempt to solve an issue that Truetype fonts cause:

On the truetype font file, you have some fields that indicate Bold and Italic (like the tags in MP3, to have an idea..)

What I have recently noticed, is that in addition to these, there are also some other free text fields used to indicate fonts attributes. It is very common to find inside them strings like "SemiBold" , "Capitals", "SmallCaps"....

What I understood using a FontEditor to look into them, is that only original Official Fonts have those fields filled following some rules, but as soon as you get freeFonts or fonts that *may* have been manipulated (e.g. converted from MAC format) then you can find *any* value inside them.

So for XARA using the bit "Bold" or "Italic" was not enough, and as soon as it recognize that used fonts have those fields with different values it creates the "All Variants" entry.

- XARA can confirm if this is correct ?

Cheers.

[wuerthne]

No, sorry, this understanding is incorrect. There is nothing more to the "All variants" entry than what I described above.

Martin