Font problems when passing files between OS10 and XP

[Anonymous]

Hi all

I work in a multiplatform office (XP and OS10) & we are experiencing font problems when transferring Archicad/plotmaker files between operating systems. Specifically, a font set to "Serifa 55 Roman" on and XP machine is displayed correctly as "Serifa 55 Roman" on an OS10 machine... but when the Archicad file is saved under OS10 and passed back to the XP sys, the font name has been changed by OS10 to "Serifa Roman" and is displayed as an arial default font.

Any of you MAC folks know how to set OS 10 so that it doesn't rename the font? My guess is that it has something to do with the MACs' "Serifa 55 Roman" font being stored in a folder called "Serifa Roman"...

Thanks!

[Karl Ottenstein]

Someone else hopefully has an easier (er, 'real') answer...

But, you might try this, since you have XP machines available:

I've been playing with the 30 day trial of a font editor to clean up some of the things in MrHand (a copyrighted font - so I can't distribute it of course) that I don't like and make it more readable to my eye...

http://www.high-logic.com/download.html

Open your font in FontCreator 5.5 and go to the Format | Naming menu/dialog. You'll probably see Macintosh Roman under Platform - as well as one ore more Unicode entries (for XP). Compare the font family name used for Macintosh vs Unicode... that might be where the 55 is screwed up. Make the names identical for each platform, save the font as a new name (e.g., Name-Your Firm). Uninstall the old font on each machine (Font control panel on XP, drag to trash from Fonts folder on Mac) and install your revised copy.

Cheers,
Karl

PS Something I learned from reading the manual for the above is that the name of the font file has nothing to do with the name of the font as installed! Only the contents of the Naming block are used on each platform. The file can have any name... so the folder/names that you see in Finder / Explorer are meaningless to solving the problem.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Karl ! - I had no idea how to go about renaming a font. I'll let you know if that works

[Thomas Holm]

Don wrote:
Any of you MAC folks know how to set OS 10 so that it doesn't rename the font? My guess is that it has something to do with the MACs' "Serifa 55 Roman" font being stored in a folder called "Serifa Roman"...Thanks!

You could try just pulling the font out of the folder... (and restart)
But my guess is that wouldn't work.

Make sure the fonts are identical. Note that MacOSX can use Windows TrueType fonts (extension.ttf) but Windows not Mac fonts without editing.
Copy the font from Window's font folder and transfer it to the one of the Mac's font folders (there are several). Make sure you remove all others with the same or similar names, from all font folders. Restart.

And - on MacOSX, use a font utility all the time, like Linotypes FontExplorer (free - and professional!) for example. It's a bit problematic to keep track of all the different font folders otherwise. And Adobe's programs use their own font caches too. Linotype keeps track of it all.