With literally thousands of digital typefaces on the market, it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd. Every major vendor has versions of Caslon, Garamond, and Goudy, as well as many other classic text faces; and it takes a pretty good eye to tell the difference from one company to the next. Often the significant difference comes down to the delivery system: how many faces are included? What is the keyboard layout? And what about prices?
For display faces, the selection has been less satisfying until recently, often sending designers into the public domain/shareware channels, where they have often found disappointment in uneven character weights and poor kerning information.
More recently, however, large and small font vendors from The Font Haus to Letter Perfect are moving in to fill the void with quality faces designed to be used in larger sizes. As the selection grows, we still come back to the same criteria: fit, features, and price.
Now, Letraset has come out with an exclusive set of striking faces taken from its world-renowned display type library. There are currently over 100 faces available in the Fontek collection. Fontek faces are shipped with both PostScript Type 1 and TrueType formats on the same disk.
Although the bitmap files are named “Fonts” (plural), there is only one face per package. Where a face is available in more than one weight, such as Van Dijk and Van Dijk Bold, they are shipped as two separate packages.
A number of the faces consist of all capital letters. Despite the aesthetic reasons for all-cap faces, they are difficult to puzzle out if you’re using one of the font menu utilities, such as MenuFonts or WYSIWYG Menus. A better solution would be to put duplicates of the capital letters in the lower case slots, too. This would also help as you switch from one face to another.
Some extremely condensed faces, such as Bordeaux and Fashion Compressed look a little ragged at 300 dpi, but most ultra-compressed faces have trouble at low resolutions.
The Fontek catalog states that “each disk contains a complete character set, alternatives, accents, and symbols.” While I haven’t examined the entire Fontek library (yet), I haven’t seen very many alternate characters. Plaza is a notable exception. Although there are no characters in the lower case positions, there are quite a few in the option and shift-option positions. The rationale behind their specific locations remains hidden; two alternate As are obtained by pressing Option/5 and Shift/Option/=. Thank goodness for PopChar.
If you look at the rub-on (remember those?) versions of Avant Garde or Bookman,* you’ll find oodles of alternates. Everybody seems to feel that Macintosh faces must contain all of the “Apple standard” characters in the same keyboard positions, so that if you set a block of text in one face and then switch to another face, you’ll still have the same words and symbols in the same places. This makes sense for text faces, but is less important for display faces. (And, in fact, the all-caps faces already break this “rule.”)
Ease-of-use ought to be a criteria for typefaces, just as it is for other software; and this is the one area where the Fontek collection could be improved by a more logical keyboard layout. These minor quibbles aside, the Fontek faces are fun to work with and of high quality.
The price is certainly right. At $39 per face (retail), you can afford to try a few. The least expensive of Adobe’s normal sets lists for $145. This set might consist of two or three faces, but you have no choice as to the combination. With Letraset’s FonTek collection, you only pay for what you want. But you’ll probably want lots.
*Why hasn’t anybody brought out a face of Avant Garde and Bookman alternate characters?
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