Are there still font name limitations regarding the lengths of the names? I have a new font with a rather long family name and long style names like “Extralight Italic”. I vaguely remember that the postscript name (ID6) shouldn’t exceed 29 characters, full name (ID4) not more then 31 characters. How does Glyphs handle this?
I remember one solution when ID4 is longer then 31 characters: Add ID18 (with a max of 31 characters). When I look into the fonts Glyphs generated, I see that it’s doing just this, but in a very inconsistent way. It changes for example “Extralight Italic” in ID18 to “Exlight Italic”, but “Ultralight Italic” to “Ultralight It”.
Is it wise to add a custom parameter in this cases, or even for all styles?
Glyphs tries to shorten the names by using abbreviations for certain words (like Extra>Ex) automatically. Please check the resulting files (with OTMaster or TTX) and see what happens. IF you don’t like what you see there, you need to use custom parameters.
thanks, this seems a reasonable way to do the naming and keep them short. However, I think I run into a bug with the newest version of Glyphs (796). When I do Italics there is always the same name ID 1 for Windows (platformID 3) regardless which name I put into the Style-name field. See images attached.
I have a nagging feeling that the (order of the) numbers are wrong. I can double check for you if you like, but for Name ID 18, I would simply use the compatibleFullName parameter.
I had a look at your file, and makeotf ignores your Name ID 18 entry, probably because it is the default full name anyway. It only makes sense to set it if it were different from the Mac Name ID 4, which is not the case in your font. To test, you can add ‘blabla’ to it, and then makeotf will not ignore it.
Yes. MakeOTF has some opinions about duplicating names. Thats why Glyphs writes its own name table now. I added the parameter as you described and it worked fine for me.