Where to get free and low-cost fonts
I enjoyed writing a story for Macworld about where to get free and low-cost fonts. The “free font” landscape has changed dramatically in the past few years, with Google offering hundreds of mixed-quality typefaces, professional designers offering up free and low-cost fonts, and licensing restrictions becoming much more transparent.
Have a look at where and how you can get affordable fonts for your next project: http://www.macworld.com/article/2038682/font-free-for-all-where-to-get-free-and-low-cost-fonts.html
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
Dear Jay,
I have found some beautiful fonts for my publication in Quark 9.1, the only problem is, that when I export in PDF with fonts embedded, Quark explodes and I loose all unsaved work.
To get around this, what do I do? I spent many hours converting the initial caps or dingbat fonts to images and inserting them as needed, but this is very time consuming and the out put when printed is of uncertain quality.
Any advice? Some of these fonts like medieval dingbats, or Kanzlei-Initialen are just too unique to replace with other fonts, and I really like them…
Afflicted: one technique I’ve used is to convert the font to another format, which often cleans up any problems it may have in its encoding. I hope you’re using a Mac — if so, try using one of these utilities to convert the font to OpenType format:
FontGear’s FontXChange ($99) http://www.fontgear.net
FontLab’s TransType Pro ($179) http://www.fontlab.com
I’m sure there are Windows utilities as well — may the font force be with you!
Thanks, Jay, I’ll try that; but no, I am also MS PC Afflicted…
Those folks may have Windows versions of their utilities. I just haven’t checked.
Jay,
I tried converting those fonts, and when the conversion program finishes it gives me a font, the table of which in each glyph entry is empty…!
So, no, problem non solved…any thoughts why Quark 9.1 crashes with these fonts, are they just too intricate for the space the PDF export filter alots for the font tables?
Are we having fun yet? ;-)
My next step would be to open the font in Fontographer or FontLab and re-generate it. Those programs usually pop up an error message if there’s a problem. You can then go fix the problem (in Fontographer or FontLab) and re-export.
I wish I had a simpler answer for you…
Before trying all that, though, I would use the font in another application and generate a PDF from that application. If the other app doesn’t have trouble, then the culprit may be QuarkXPress. But if it chokes as well, then the font need some work.
A friend who is a programmer, said the problem is most likely in the very nature of these fonts, which use a lost more memory: most PDF export filters allow only so much memory space for the font tables, and these being uniquely excessive, they just did not make the arbitrary export filter programmer’s imposed limit….