What to do about long Full Font Name / Name table ID 4

Using Fonts
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According to the current fontspector checks, Name ID 4 should not be longer than 32 characters otherwise there are problems:

Name ID 4 ‘Full Font Name’ exceeds 32 characters. This has been found to cause problems with the dropdown menu in old versions of Microsoft Word as well as shaping issues for some accented letters in Microsoft Word on Windows 10 and 11.

I have some fonts where the full font name is too long so I will truncate it. But I’m wondering where the break points of doing this is, in my own testing on Mac the font name is still displaying the full font name via ID 16 and 17. I also tested them on Windows 11 and it’s more or less displaying correct full name. Is there anything I need to be aware of, for example cross-platform document breaking, etc?

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I have not encountered those issues myself TBH. You can probably ignore this. The only real problem with this long names is that the font menu in Word is very short, and the user will always see a truncated version of your font name. Other than that, I found that long names work fine as long as the font installs. Just test install it in Windows 11 and if you don’t get an error at installation, you’re good.

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It’s actually not Name ID 4 that has the limit, but Name ID 1! Stephen Nixon did a lot of test cases on all the name fields and limits. If Name ID 1 (a combo of Name ID 1 and Name ID 2, Font Name + Style) exceeds 32 characters, glyphs beyond what seems to be Win1252 char set will use a fallback font. :roll_eyes: It’s annoying and such a weird bug.
Names beyond the limit in the Full Name ID 4 actually had no adverse effect in Win or Mac apps.

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Oh Interesting! The fontspector test still specifies this limit, is Stephen’s tests documented anywhere?

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I believe it is this GH issue: com.google.fonts/check/name/family_and_style_max_length is overly-strict · Issue #2179 · fonttools/fontbakery · GitHub

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That’s the one. Thanks @jkutilek!

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Also, fontbakery doesn’t warn about it. I’ve read somewhere that fontbakery is still the first of the two to get the latest updates (but not sure if that’s still the case)

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(I accidentally deleted my post while trying to edit it. sorry!) Here it is again…

I need to correct myself here… it’s only Name ID 1, the Family Name that has the limit.So, when we have a name like Fontname AB Devanagari Condensed ExtraBold (42 char) char and then another font in the same Family is called Fontname AB Devanagari Condensed Medium (40), the Style Name ID 2 would be Regular for both of these. In WIN Office apps, the font menu will truncate and you will only see Fontname AB Devanagari Condensed and then again, Fontname AB Devanagari Condensed. There will be no visible distinction between the font names. The other consequence is the fall back font beyond Win1252 and in ExtLatin…

So, to fix it, you’d have to edit the names to something like:

Fontname AB Devanagari Cnd ExBd (31 char)

Fontname AB Devanagari Cnd Md (29 char)

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Fontbakery is in maintenance mode, as you can see in the graph at the top of Contributors to fonttools/fontbakery · GitHub there is little contribution to the project recently.

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