There are a couple of low effort solutions: Please don’t send me back to the font mines, Adobe Who Bears the Lash…

I do not want to spend my days doing this…I want to make new games, damn it. If the font doesn’t match the exact character spacing of the current version (and I can’t imagine they will), I have to rejigger all of the art in each book to make the text flow properly.Īgain: F…M…L. Because it’s not just a matter of clicking a button to switch a font. So I’m looking at a future where, in order to do a reprint with errata, work stops on new projects for months while I beat my head bloody re-laying out hundreds of pages of text…to make changes only to a dozen pages or so. I had to change some fonts in the last printing of Mouse Guard-the book, the cards, the screen, etc.-and it was a massive headache, amounting to months of work. Which brings me to say to you (as I lean on your shoulder and look into your soul with my Thousand-Yard Stare): Fuck. We will not be able to open our docs to look at the layout-let alone make edits-without buying (ugh) and remapping (uuughhh) all of the fonts in each of our press-ready layout files.Įssentially, our books will be forever trapped-uneditable-in the last version of the PDFs we created in 2022 or earlier. Postscript fonts simply will not load into InDesign (it’s already happening in Photoshop). Why am I going on about fonts and layout? What is this Fontocalypse of which I speak? Well my friend, in 2023 Adobe shall deprecate all Postscript fonts. The smallest change to the text-like when we correct errata-must be carefully undertaken so as not to destabilize the layout and cause re-rag and overflow. And if just one word from one page flows onto the next page, the effect can fuck up the whole layout and cause poor me and Dro a massive, collective headache as we try to keep our beautiful pages intact.īy the time BWHQ ships a book to the press, the interior is a delicate balance of readability, information density, art and page count. Meaning, words shift position from line to line. Switching out a font, even only from one foundry to another, causes the most dreaded of problems in the text: re-rag. There are dozens of variants of font faces in Postscript alone.

But I never saw the point in converting our BW texts to OTFs because we were using the Adobe industry standard and, as those of you in the print industry know, switching font types is always a huge headache. In the intervening two decades since we first published Burning Wheel, a new font type has emerged known as Open Type. So the choice to use them seemed trivial, perhaps even smart.

Even printers insisted that all documents be submitted to them using Postscript fonts. The safest, most reliable and highest quality fonts, they were designed by Adobe itself. 17 years ago, I worked in the printing industry and Postscript fonts were seen as the industry standard. You may have noticed that we switched from Quark Xpress to Adobe InDesign back in 2004, and since then all of our books have been laid out in the InDesign environment using Postscript fonts. If you’ve read our colophons, you’ve seen the software, hardware and fonts we use to create our books-Bauer Bodoni, Caliban, Post Antiqua and Post Medieval in Burning Wheel, for example. Today I speak as a herald of a coming apocalypse-the Fontocalypse, in fact-and I come to you with a tale of woe and a plea for help.

Free quincy script font