Cooper Hewitt Font File Gripe

[Bobby H]

The open source type family Cooper Hewitt has earned some praise from type critics. It's a clean and attractive alternative to some other sans serif typefaces that have been used to death. As good a design as it might be, I ran into an annoying technical problem with its font files this morning.

I'm working on a replacement face project in which the customer provided artwork used light weight of Cooper Hewitt for the copy. I hadn't messed with this type family until now. I needed to try out some other design possibilities to fit unusual spaces of existing cabinets. Cooper Hewitt is available at a number of free font sites like Font Squirrel.

Upon installing the 14 font files, only one weight was available in CorelDRAW X6. No fly-out or anything. Only a few weights were available in Adobe Illustrator CC. The same problem occurred using either Bitstream Font Navigator or installing the fonts directly into Windows' own font manager. I noticed some messy naming in the font files -an extra dot in the names before the .otf extension. Changing that didn't fix anything unfortunately.

Next step: I pulled all the font files into FontLab Studio 5. First I tried simply re-generating all the .otf files, thinking that might fix some possibly corrupted data. When bringing up the re-saved .otf files in Bitstream Font Navigator I noticed several of the font weights looked identical, thin yet named "bold." So I went back into FontLab and checked the Font Info for each weight. The font weight selections turned out to be not correctly specified. Nothing marked italic and everything listed as bold. It took a few minutes to carefully get the font styles marked correctly. Then I re-generated the .otf files. They worked properly.

Anyway, I wonder why type family like this would have such a silly error in it, and one that is apparently not fixed. I wonder if the same problem crops up on Mac-based systems.

 

[Bobby H]

A little add-on to my first post: my comment about the re-generated fonts working properly only applies in the basic character table sense. Some of the OpenType functions didn't carry over properly.

I did a little additional research about this typeface. It turns out the OTF files are pretty much friendly only to Macs. But I still wonder if the odd-ball style naming issues are present on that platform as well.

One upside: at the cooperhewitt.org website they do have other resources. They have a basic 4-font .ttf package for Windows PCs, which doesn't help me much for my particular project since the client has gravitated toward the really thin weights of the type family. They also have UFO files of the typeface that can be used in leading font editors. I may have to give that one a try to generate fully usable OTF files.

 

[Suz]

A little add-on to my first post: my comment about the re-generated fonts working properly only applies in the basic character table sense. Some of the OpenType functions didn't carry over properly.

Bobby, glad you shared this. Have had some problems with different fonts myself after having switched over to windows 7.0, which was some time ago. I was wondering if anyone here had used Fontlab as I was considering it myself to fix some of the font problems I have had. I also wanted the program to build my own fonts. I started hand-lettering years ago before everyone had computers like we do these days. I did have access to Line-o-type machine at Newspaper I worked at, then later a Gerber sign maker machine. Fonts were spendy and an investment, they still can be. However, I'm happy to have so many that have just come with different programs I have purchased.