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Category: Font

Quark Teams up with Fontsmith to Provide $1597 Worth of Fonts for Free

September 18, 2018December 3, 2018@QuarkXPress, Font, News, QuarkXPress 2018, Special OffersNo Comments

Quark Software announced on September 17th a new software bundle offer that will save designers £1240/€1376/$1597 when buying or upgrading to QuarkXPress 2018.

The bundle offer allows users with any version of QuarkXPress to receive a set of 12 professional Fontsmith typefaces encompassing 56 individual fonts plus 200 icons, completely free when they upgrade to QuarkXPress 2018 or purchase a new license.

Fontsmith’s Professional OpenType Fonts

Fontsmith is a leading and established boutique type foundry known for creating fonts that are distinctively human and full of character. Founded in 1997 by Jason Smith, Fontsmith today represents a truly international team of designers working from a London studio. The Fontsmith library includes an extensive collection of typefaces – elegant and traditional, contemporary and quirky – suitable for a range of applications. In addition the team design and create bespoke typefaces for global brands including ING Bank, British Gas, Jaguar, ITV, Renault, Sainsbury’s, Sky News, Telefónica Movistar, UEFA Champions League, Colgate, and Xerox.

Availabilty

The new Fontsmith bundle is available until 20 December 2018 with the purchase of every new full version of QuarkXPress ($849), upgrade ($185 from version 2017; $399 from versions 3 to 2016) or Competitive Upgrade ($399 from InDesign, CorelDraw, Microsoft Publisher and Photoshop users). The offer is also valid on the purchase of non-profit ($175), government and single education licenses ($79) of QuarkXPress 2018. To find out more about the offer, restrictions and how to redeem the free fonts please visit: http://content.quark.com/fontsmith-bundle-us.html.

 For Just $399 Switch from InDesign to QuarkXPress and Get Fonts Worth over $1500
Attention InDesign, CorelDraw, Microsoft Publisher and Photoshop users: Anyone who owns software that competes with QuarkXPress is eligible to purchase a full new, perpetual and upgradeable QuarkXPress 2018 license for just $399 instead of $829, which is a savings of $450 off the regular full new license price. Customers who purchase the Competitive Upgrade will also receive the free Fontsmith typefaces as part of the  font bundle promotion. Find out more about the competitive upgrade offer.

QuarkXPress 2018 is available for purchase through the Quark Store, from our Quark telesales team or from any of our Authorized Resellers.

Learn more about QuarkXPress 2018: http://www.quark.com/2018.

Matthias Gilke

Color Fonts – the next big thing in typography

February 24, 2018March 23, 2018Font, QuarkXPress 2018, TypographyNo Comments

Since the introduction of OpenType fonts, there hasn’t been a big change in typography. Until color fonts emerged. Their birth probably was in 2010 when Apple added colorful emoji, which we all have been using since on our mobile.

However – due to the lack of color fonts – designers have always been using colorful fonts; mostly by taking an existing font and converting it to boxes and then changing its shape, its outline, adding colors or blends. So they weren’t fonts anymore but looked like type.

“Stroke text” is another use case where designers add a colorful border to live text, often also even dashed or stripped. And working around the issue that kerning and overlapping suddenly needed to be adjusted.

If you want to read more color fonts (or chromatic type) – which are not new; the first production types appeared in the 1840 – then read  more about it here: https://ilovetypography.com/2017/04/03/the-evolution-of-chromatic-fonts/

Color fonts save time!

“For designers, Color Fonts are gold!

Think of the time you had to spend in the past taking a plain font shape and then running it through lots of filters and other steps to get a chiseled look; brush strokes, wood, etc.

Now you just type!”

– Kurt Lang, JKL Studios, when pre-release testing color fonts in QuarkXPress 2018

Color fonts represent a key evolution in typography. They add rich graphic features into font files. And as they behave like standard fonts, once design applications support them, they are easy to use and easily accessible for millions of creatives.

And they are fun!

Color fonts can impact any type of text, can contain multiple colors, shades, textures, blends and transparency. And even animations (ok, now that’s hard to print ;-)

Are there different formats for color fonts?

Yes. There are four different formats and some formats support both vector and bitmap:

Color Font formatBitmap?Vector?Format?
Apple SBIX✔Proprietary
Google CBDT✔Proprietary
Microsoft COLR✔Based on OpenType
W3C SVG
(OpenType SVG)
✔✔Based on OpenType

All modern browsers support some format of color fonts, but not all. For example, Google’s CBDT is only available in Chrome on Android.

Which creative pro applications for print design support Color Fonts?

Full support in Illustrator CC 2018, Photoshop CC 2018 and QuarkXPress 2018

Photoshop CC 2017 was the first application to support bitmap color fonts. With the release Photoshop CC 2018 also vector color fonts are supported.

Illustrator CC 2018 is the first version of Illustrator to support color fonts, both vector and bitmap.

And QuarkXPress 2018 is the first version of QuarkXPress to fully supports color fonts, both bitmap and vector; in the formats SVG, SBIX and COLR.

Experimental support in InDesign

InDesign CC 2018 added experimental color font support, Adobe calls it a “technology preview feature”. According to a blog entry from Adobe there seems to be output issues with Color Fonts in InDesign: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/kb/ot-svg-color-fonts.html

Color Font format support by application

ApplicationOpenType SVG VECTOROpenType SVG BITMAPApple SBIXMicrosoft COLR
(last updated March 14, 2018)
Adobe Illustrator CC 2018✅ – YES✅ – YES✅ – YES❌ – No
Adobe InDesign CC 2018💤 Experimental💤 Experimental💤 Experimental❌ – No
Adobe Photoshop CC 2018✅ – YES✅ – YES✅ – YES❌ – No
Affinity Designer 1.6❌ – No❌ – No❌ – No❌ – No
Affinity Photo 1.6❌ – No❌ – No❌ – No❌ – No
Pixelmator 3.7❌ – No✅ – YES✅ – YES❌ – No
QuarkXPress 2018✅ – YES✅ – YES✅ – YES✅ – YES

Can I use them in Print and Web?

Yes. In digital publishing (browsers, apps), color fonts have been around for a while. We all use them (e.g. emoticons).

In Print – if the application fully supports it – color fonts can be used too, colors are RGB and can be color managed using ICC-based color management. Similar to how an RGB image is color managed.

Where can I get some color fonts?

Here are some 100+ sample color fonts to download:

The Typodermic Color Font Experiment

Please read their license agreement first.

More fonts can be found here:

https://creativemarket.com/blog/color-fonts

Enjoy!

More background info

  • http://colorfonts.wtf/
  • https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt765165(v=vs.85).aspx
  • https://helpx.adobe.com/typekit/using/ot-svg-color-fonts.html
  • https://pixelambacht.nl/2014/multicolor-fonts/
  • https://blog.fontlab.com/font-tech/color-fonts/color-font-format-proposals/

The article “Color Fonts – the next big thing in typography” appeared first on planetquark.com

 

Matthias Guenther

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people. Before joining Quark in 1997, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represented Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

From 1997 until 2019 Matthias played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop, mobile and enterprise software. From February 2014 until January 2019 he headed Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit; and was therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

Matthias does not work for Quark anymore. If you want to connect with him, please visit his LinkedIn profile on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mguenther/

https://twitter.com/HamburQ

Designer using fonts on MacOS? This article is a must-read!

February 15, 2018Font, How-toNo Comments

If you use your Mac professionally, you most likely also work with fonts.

Fonts are essential for designs and professional print.

And if corrupt, they can cause issues, even crash applications upon launch. Or change your output.

One of the best articles I have ever read, summarizing font usage, font management and how to solve font issues is this article by Kurt Lang. I feel it is a must-read for everyone:

http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html

Kurt has been a frequent poster on Apple’s forums and is constantly updating his article. If you benefit from his article, please consider making a small contribution via PayPal.

Matthias Guenther

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people. Before joining Quark in 1997, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represented Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

From 1997 until 2019 Matthias played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop, mobile and enterprise software. From February 2014 until January 2019 he headed Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit; and was therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

Matthias does not work for Quark anymore. If you want to connect with him, please visit his LinkedIn profile on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mguenther/

https://twitter.com/HamburQ

Charting, graphing and timekeeping with OpenType specialist fonts

January 15, 2018January 15, 2018Font, QuarkXPress 2017, TypographyNo Comments

When QuarkXPress introduced colour Open Type transformations in 2016, there was just one font, Chartwell, that could take advantage of them. Chartwell was a neat trick: you type in numbers, and it turns them into graphs and charts. But Chartwell was expensive, and it only offered a few, fairly basic, chart types. Times have moved on: with more support, more font makers are making self-transforming icon fonts. But they’re hard to find (mainly because there’s no established word to describe them). It’s time to have another look, because there’s a lot more available now, and some of it is free.

Self-transforming fonts
Self-transforming fonts: Chartwell, Amazing Infographic, Spark and Clocko

Essentially, all of these fonts take advantage of the programming capabilities in OpenType. Fonts have been available for 20 years that offer you pie charts, but these depend on having one glyph for every different pie. These looked quite cool at the time, but they really only offered one colour fonts, and could only show 10%, 20%, 30% and so on, with just one thing. Self-transforming fonts are like going from candles to colour changing LED lights.

The fonts we’re going to look at are Chartwell version 2, Amazing Infographic, AtF Spark and Clocko. Amazing Infographic and Spark are available for free, Clocko for a few dollars, and Chartwell for $25 for a single style, and around the $300 mark for all eighteen styles. Chartwell, Amazing Infographic and Spark do charts and graphs, while Clocko does (you guessed it) clocks.

If you’re interested in how the trick is done, OpenType has a basic programming language built into it so that, when you type ‘if’ it can set the correct ligature (QuarkXPress can do this for non-OpenType fonts as well), or combine a letter and its accent. As OpenType has grown up, this has steadily advanced, so that there are now all kinds of tricks that can be done. These are designed to make creating and managing fonts and their variants easier and more consistent, but, as with anything, clever people quickly start finding other uses for them. Before you start reaching for the trial version of FontLab VI to make your own, you ought to know that creating self-transforming fonts require a fairly unique pairing of design and programming skills, and a lot of work.

But you don’t need to be able to create them to make use of them.

Use case

First, though, what’s the use case?

Let’s see. You’re doing a corporate report, and the PR team who wrote it want you to include lots of little bar and pie charts. They’ve helpfully sent you a hundred Excel charts to include, each with about five numbers in them. Now, you could copy and paste all these charts as native objects, reformat them all to match the corporate style and then paste them one by one anchored in the text, but, first, this is a lot of work, and, second, you can just bet that they’re going to come back at the last minute and want to change half the numbers, or, worse, decide that the bars should be pies, the pies lines, and the lines circles.

Now, I have to say that, when I first bought Chartwell, I was doing exactly that, and it was a fairly simple business decision to pay the $300 and save myself a couple of days work, which, within the total project price, was a win for me, and a win for my customer.

Chartwell

The original Chartwell could do a few things, but version 2, which has now been repackaged into a co-ordinate series and a volume/area series, does areas, lines, rings, roses, radars, bubbles, scatters, and floating lines. You can’t delete your copy of Excel yet, but almost anything that will actually look clean and good in a corporate report can be achieved with Chartwell.

In use, it’s very easy:

Chartwell numbers only

You just type in the numbers, put a + between them, and then turn the Open Type feature ‘discretionary ligatures’ to on. The one annoying thing about Chartwell is that the charts come out quite small, so you have to blow them up. To use different colours, you have to have the QuarkXPress preference Project: General: Allow OpenType Transformations on Mixed Colour Text turned on.

Chartwell font in use

If you add particular prefixes, such as A=, you get gridlines. What you get depends on which font variant you’re using, but the instructions are clear and comprehensive, though I find I have to look them up again every time for anything complicated.

This is all well and good, and if you’ve got a job coming up that will pay for them, it’s an easy purchase to make.

Amazing Infographic

On the other hand, if you just want to play around, or you’ve got those kind of clients who demand everything but are never willing to pay for it, then investing $300 might seem a bit of a stretch. In that case—or if you just like having different options—then you should definitely take a look at Amazing Infographic. This font does bar charts, circle charts, pie charts and people icons. The syntax is a little different. For the examples at the top, you would type in @c@c099% @b@b6262% @p@p8787%. Like Chartwell, you can change the colours, and, unlike Chartwell, you can put numbers in charts, regularly coloured or reversed out. Your corporate clients might be more demanding on having exactly the type of chart they want, but, for a bit of fun, a newsletter, or pitching to the client what you could really do if they only had the budget, Amazing Infographic will do the things you’re most likely to want, and for free.

AtF Spark

AtF Spark is made for creating sparklines, which are those in-line charts which you see in the financial pages of newspapers, and anywhere else people can think of putting them. Spark is also free. To quote Edward Tufte, who popularised them, “A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution.” The Spark font does bars, rows of dots, or dot lines. Again, the format is slightly different. For the examples at the top, you would type: {10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100} 4,1,5,6,1,5,4,2,3,4,2,5,4,2,5,7,3,5,8,7,7,7,8,9}, and you select a different variant from the six Spark fonts. Unlike Chartwell, AtF Spark has been exactly sized to fit on the line, and works (as it were) ‘out of the box’.

Clocko

For a change of pace, Clocko makes clocks. At only $5, I bought it because I just couldn’t resist it, even though I didn’t actually have a commercial use for it at the time (and still don’t). In interface terms, it could teach all of the others something about user-friendliness. All you do is type in the time, like 12:23, and then set the font to Clocko. If you make an error, it just displays the numbers you typed. If you put a letter of the alphabet in front, you get different frames for the clock. In the examples at the top, I typed x12:23 y14:22 z1:32. As with the others, you can alter the colours, though this is not as useful (or attractive) as it is in regular charts.

What’s next?

So far as I know, these are the only infographic type fonts which use OpenType transformations (I would be very interested in hearing about any others). There are a lot more fonts out there which use the transformations the way they were designed. But more will be along. Over the last year, the OpenType specification has gone through another round of expansion, and we’ll be seeing ever more possibilities. Right now, available colour fonts and variable fonts are at the strictly novelty stage, but we’re going to be seeing some genuinely useful examples appearing over the next twelve months.

Perhaps as importantly, the latest iteration of FontLab, which is arguably the most significant font design tool, makes the business of designing harmonious, well-balanced and well-kerned fonts, and manipulating them with OpenType substitutions, dramatically quicker than it was previously—although long-term users are complaining that it looks and feels different.

The other thing to keep an eye on is font-licensing. There are still, regrettably, amateur designers putting out fonts marked as ‘for personal use only’. Some websites tell you about this before you download them, but, with others, you have to check the license carefully when you get them. My rule is: if I can’t use it for every project, then it doesn’t get space on my system. Mercifully, we are seeing more fonts issued under the SIL font license, which protects the font name (so we don’t have a thousand unofficial variations on the same font), but allows derivative versions and modifications.

 

Martin Turner

Martin Turner is the author of Desk Top Publishing with QuarkXPress 2016, Desk Top Publishing with QuarkXPress 2017, and presenter on the video series Desk Top Publishing with QuarkXPress.

http://www.martinturner.org.uk

QuarkXPress 2016 now supports 77 OpenType features (plus 5)

October 6, 2016October 11, 2016Font, Learn, QuarkXPress 20162 Comments

stylistic-font

Here’s a list of all 77 OpenType features supported by the user interface of QuarkXPress 2016 (12.2), both Run based features and Glyph based features:

  1. aalt – Access All Alternates
  2. afrc – Alternative Fractions
  3. c2sc – Small Capitals From Capitals
  4. calt – Contextual Alternates
  5. case – Case-Sensitive Forms
  6. clig – Contextual Ligatures
  7. cpsp – Capital Spacing
  8. cwsh – Contextual Swash
  9. dlig – Discretionary Ligatures
  10. dnom – Denominators
  11. expt – Expert Forms
  12. frac – Fractions
  13. fwid – Full Widths
  14. halt – Alternate Half Widths
  15. hist – Historical Forms
  16. hkna – Horizontal Kana Alternates
  17. hngl – Hangul
  18. hojo – Hojo Kanji Forms (JIS X 0212-1990 Kanji Forms)
  19. hwid – Half Widths
  20. ital – Italics
  21. jp04 – JIS2004 Forms
  22. jp78 – JIS78 Forms
  23. jp83 – JIS83 Forms
  24. jp90 – JIS90 Forms
  25. kern – Kerning
  26. liga – Standard Ligatures
  27. lnum – Lining Figures
  28. locl – Localized Forms
  29. nlck – NLC Kanji Forms
  30. numr – Numerators
  31. onum – Oldstyle Figures
  32. ordn – Ordinals
  33. ornm – Ornaments
  34. palt – Proportional Alternate Widths
  35. pnum – Proportional Figures
  36. pwid – Proportional Widths
  37. qwid – Quarter Widths
  38. ruby – Ruby Notation Forms
  39. salt – Stylistic Alternates
  40. sinf – Scientific Inferiors
  41. smcp – Small Capitals
  42. smpl – Simplified Forms
  43. ss01 – Stylistic Set 1
  44. ss02 – Stylistic Set 2
  45. ss03 – Stylistic Set 3
  46. ss04 – Stylistic Set 4
  47. ss05 – Stylistic Set 5
  48. ss06 – Stylistic Set 6
  49. ss07 – Stylistic Set 7
  50. ss08 – Stylistic Set 8
  51. ss09 – Stylistic Set 9
  52. ss10 – Stylistic Set 10
  53. ss11 – Stylistic Set 11
  54. ss12 – Stylistic Set 12
  55. ss13 – Stylistic Set 13
  56. ss14 – Stylistic Set 14
  57. ss15 – Stylistic Set 15
  58. ss16 – Stylistic Set 16
  59. ss17 – Stylistic Set 17
  60. ss18 – Stylistic Set 18
  61. ss19 – Stylistic Set 19
  62. ss20 – Stylistic Set 20
  63. subs – Subscript
  64. sups – Superscript
  65. swsh – Swash
  66. titl – Titling Alternates
  67. tnam – Traditional Name Forms
  68. tnum – Tabular Figures
  69. trad – Traditional Forms
  70. twid – Third Widths
  71. valt – Alternate Vertical Metrics
  72. vrt2 – Vertical Writing
  73. vhal – Alternate Vertical Half Metrics
  74. vkna – Vertical Kana Alternates
  75. vkrn – Vertical Kerning
  76. vpal – Proportional Alternate Vertical Metrics
  77. zero – Slashed Zero

QuarkXPress 2016 also supports 5 OpenType baseline tags through Character Alignment feature:

  1. icfb – Ideographic character face bottom edge baseline
  2. icft – Ideographic character face top edge baseline
  3. ideo – Ideographic em-box bottom edge baseline
  4. idtp – Ideographic em-box top edge baseline
  5. romn – The baseline used by simple alphabetic scripts such as Latin, Cyrillic and Greek

To see what these features mean and to see an explanation of the four-letter-code, please refer to the OpenType reference:

https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm
and
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/baselinetags.htm

 

Need more? Please let us know!

 

Matthias Guenther

Both an engineer and a layout artist, Matthias bridges the gap between technology and people. Before joining Quark in 1997, Matthias pioneered print, Web, and multimedia products for multiple German publishing companies. He is an active participant in design and publishing communities and represented Quark in the Ghent PDF Workgroup.

From 1997 until 2019 Matthias played a central role in shaping Quark’s desktop, mobile and enterprise software. From February 2014 until January 2019 he headed Quark’s Desktop Publishing business unit; and was therefore responsible for QuarkXPress.

Matthias does not work for Quark anymore. If you want to connect with him, please visit his LinkedIn profile on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mguenther/

https://twitter.com/HamburQ

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