Fonts and Font Mapping between Windows and MacOS

Fonts and Font Mapping between Windows and MacOS

The fonts configuration in JobBag allows you to define a mapping between fonts used on Windows vs Mac OS X. As fonts are often named differently on the two platforms or only supported on one of the platforms it becomes important to set up this mapping.

There are also a number of places within JobBag where the choice of fonts is limited to the fonts specified here.

Font Mapping Window

On the left side of the window, there is a list of all font families installed on your computer. When a font family is selected, the available typefaces are shown in the bottom list.

The right side of the window shows the mapping that has been configured. There is a column for the fonts as they are used on Windows and a column for the Mac. You can edit both columns however the ‘other’ platform is grayed out as you can not see which fonts are available on Windows when you are using a Mac and vise versa.

You can manually type in the font names or drag the font from the font list into the mapping list to add them. You can map single typefaces or the entire font family. When mapping a font family JobBag attempts to find the typeface that best matches the font used. For this reason, we advise mapping the typeface.

Supported fonts

As the operating system is responsible for rendering text to screen any font installed can be used however there are limitations when things are printed or emailed.

When sending an email there is no support for sending along the font used. Notwithstanding the increase in the size of an email if a font is included there are severe legal restraints as many fonts are protected by copyright. An email will thus only render correctly if the recipient also has access to the font used. There are also limitations imposed by the email client the recipient uses all though most modern email applications are fully capable of correctly showing formatted emails.

When printing to the printer there are generally no limitations all though this is fully dependent on the quality of the printer driver associated with your printer. Some of the latest networked printer drivers are optimized to process the font on the printer server to minimize network traffic. This would require the fonts used to be installed on the printer.

When printing to PDF there are limitations. By default, JobBag will not embed font data into the PDF to keep the size of the PDF down. This means that the font used must be installed on the computer of anyone viewing the PDF and this is only an option if you use standard fonts. JobBag offers the option to embed the font(s) used inside of the PDF at the cost of a larger PDF file. There are however a few things that need to be taken into account:

• The font must be a “Type 3 open type” or “true type” font. Older type 1 (Postscript) and type 2 (CFF) fonts can’t be embedded in the PDF. These unsupported fonts are displayed in a brown colour.
• If you have purchased a licensed font you have to check if your license agreement allows you to distribute the font. Licensed fonts are not embedded by default and you need to specifically turn this on.