The font snob loses a round

I use InDesign, and I have more typefaces than the average bear. But in October I got a new computer, and while I still have hundreds of fonts available to me, I am now faced with designing type for a new cover, which must match the old cover, which was done in 2016, and for some reason, of all the hundreds of fonts I had then and the hundreds I have now, the four I picked for this cover are…all gone. All four of them.

Now three of them are not usual fonts, although not that unusual. But the fourth one that disappeared, between my last computer and my new one, is Univers.

Really? Somehow I lost Univers?

I have to get it again. InDesign substituted, of course, but there is no way I’m using fucking Arial. (On a book cover, I mean. Here, no problem. Or yes problem, I would prefer a slab serif, but too much trouble to change.)

I’d no idea they were so pricey. Guessing that art school kids major in Font Design because if you come up with a winner, you’re livin’ large?

$ 35.00 USD for Univers. How’d you lose fonts in moving to a new machine?? Were the licenses keyed to your Logic Board ID and not your Hard Drive?

Comic Sans. Comic Sans. Comic Sans.

I believe you mean ‘typefaces’.

When I was doing my graphic design class last year, they gifted us with a huge collection of official fonts, both famous and obscure. Just sayin’…

I sit corrected. :smack:

Out of curiosity, do you have the Doves typeface? Fascinating story.

What do you mean “all gone”? They’re not still on your old computer or hard drive either?

If you know the name of the font, Google it. One thing about typefaces is that they can’t be copyrighted–only the files that create them. So there are a ton of clones out there.

Of course, you said those other three fonts are rare, so maybe they will be harder to find. But then you’ll stumble on something else: people illegally upload copyrighted font files to the free font sites all the time. Normally I wouldn’t mention this, per the rules here, but, since you presumably already have a license for these fonts, I consider downloading a file you already own to be a gray area.

Finally, worst case, if you have an image with the fonts on it, you may be able to use a font search engine to find similar fonts. I’ve done it before. Just look for a font search engine.

Between all those, you should be able to find it–assuming you can’t just go copy the font files off from your old computer, just manually. They’re still just files, after all.

I swear I can hardly tell one from another.

I think it is kind of cute that you think “hundreds” of fonts is a lot. :slight_smile: The last time I compiled all of my fonts–dating back to bulletin board downloads from the early 1990s, multiple shareware CDs from slightly later, and internet downloads from after that–they wouldn’t all fit on a 4.2 GB DVD uncompressed so I made them into a series of “letter” zips–a.zip, b.zip, etc. and that barely fit on the DVD. IIRC it is somewhere around 110,000 fonts.

Haha, I have no idea. I haven’t a clue how computers even work. They are magic to me. Now in the case of XP I at least knew where to find the fonts. I don’t know where they are hidden in Win10. So even if my XP was still working, and I could find the fonts (and they are probably under Adobe, not Windows…I think) I wouldn’t know where to put them in Win10.

Licences? Again, no idea. I’m guessing that I accumulated some of these fonts when I used PageMaker, and hung onto them and added more with InDesign. I know I had an Adobe CD full of typestyles and images and I still have that, but Univers isn’t on it. Neither is Deepdene, which I think of as one of my favorites even though I believe I only ever used the italic font of it for the occasional drop cap. I just figured, if the type is available on my computer I can use it.

Oh, and I actually know that technically Garamond is the typeface and 12 point Garamond italic is the font. But everybody I know pretty much uses the terms interchangeably and since with modern methods we can make them any size, almost any weight, and even tilt them for italic (obviously not true italic which is obvious with the serifs), it hardly matters any more.

What is driving me crazy is that of the typefaces I have left–and there are hundreds–most of the ones I most commonly used are gone. There are some new ones. I lost Tiffany, but I now have something called Elephant. I lost Bauer Bodoni, but I have some other kind of Bodoni.

And no Dove. That is a nice typeface. Interesting story, too. Well, I never had that one, and I guess neither did anybody else.

BTW I have found two of them by typing them into Google. Univers, I can only find it free in bold. I haven’t found Bitstream Vera Sans. I’m betting that and the missing Ottawa font came from back in the days when I used WordPerfect and they’re probably out there somewhere. But I still have the Corel installation discs and I’ll bet they’re on there, too. I just have no idea where.

What is the difference, pray tell?

A typeface is Georgia. A font is Georgia 10 point bold. This distinction matted when typefaces were purchased as boxes full of metal slugs. The distinction has disappeared to all but the most dedicated pedants in the digital age.

I would like to help, but what do you need?

In Windows you can search your drives for files by name.

Do you need to modify/create glyphs? Try FontForge.

Do you just need a free (GPL) Univers clone you can use in a commercial project? Try U001.

Need to extract your font back out of a PDF document? See here.

Sure, but a font is created with a specific design size, weight, and style that may look off if you radically alter it (unless it is one of those Multiple Master or Metafonts that automatically do optical adjustment), so it matters at least a little bit.

And if you don’t know what kerning is, be very happy and carefree. You can read anything without gritting your teeth!

Had a student walk into class and yell at me: “Great! Two weeks into ‘Design Fundies’ class and I can’t drive down the freeway without mentally kerning all the billboards. Thanks. A. Lot.”

Love it.

Now that FontForge thing is interesting. I might be able to use that for this instance, because the previous cover is in a PDF file as well as being in an InDesign file. Hm…

But I might be working above my level here, because as I said, I don’t even know how some of those fonts I was using got into InDesign in the first place. They were somehow attached to WordPerfect–which I haven’t used in five or six years–and I don’t know how they transferred from there into InDesign, like, is there some central place where ALL fonts are stored?

I have searched for files by name on my new computer, and they aren’t there. But I know that some of them had weird names. I would see one name when I went into the font manager program (a WP thing) and another when I went to the directory itself.

Does that mean a vector typeface can never be a font? Because they’re all vector typefaces now but the silly puters still call them fonts.