Fonts in Foundry

Foundry
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Hi, everybody, this is my first post on this forum.

I just started dabbling in Foundry. One of the selling points for me was Foundry’s ability to self-host fonts. And this is also first stumbling block in my learning. Let me explain.

I have 4 font-families for body-text, each consisting of normal, italic and bold (12 font files in my Resources). And before you ask: no, I do not use all of them on the same page…

Now, let’s take the ‘Typeface’ stack. I am not sure how best assign those resources to particular Typeface numbers, so that there’s no conflicts further down the road, when I start adding text content. Should I

  1. make four Typeface instances, each consisting of normal, italic, bold and bold-italic for each font-family?
  2. make two Typeface instances, each consisting of normal and bold for each font-family?

Or, would you recommend a different way of handling those fonts?

My assumption was that I should use the first choice. And, indeed, this was working for me, as long as I was using only Foundry-native headers and paragraphs. But as soon as I started using BWD’s ‘Scribe’ stack, I noticed an incompatibility. There is no way to “reuse” same font files in Resources for both Foundry and the ‘Scribe’ stack (the issue with the .woff extension). Can Foundry use WOFF files without the .woff extension in their name?

I am curious, what workaround is used by people who include ‘Scribe’ stack in Foundry projects?

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To answer you specific question about the Scribe stack, it will just use the default paragraph and heading fonts defined in your Foundry Typeface settings, as the default fonts. Works great.

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Sorry to contradict you, but my experiments tell me that does not work—at least not when my fonts are in Resources. The reason is the .woff extension of font files. Scribe needs file names without an extension, hence the incompatibility between Foundry and Scribe. How do you work around this conflict?

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The only way to use web fonts in Foundry using the Typeface stack is to load a valid .woff file into Resources. The other .svg, .eot and .ttf file are not used in Foundry.

I think you are overcomplicating this and whatever font you set to be your paragraph or heading font will be picked up by the Scribe stack without needing to adjust any settings in Scribe. I have used Scribe in Foundry with local web fonts and this works. There is no conflict whatsoever so I expect you are doing something wrong in your experiments.

If however, you are referring to the Font Vault feature in Scribe, then as far as I know Foundry dos not support Font Vaults but I sure Adam will confirm this.

I would question why you want as many as 4 fonts as most applications use 2. Also you normally don’t need italic, italic bold and bold versions of each unless you will have complete paragraphs of italic, italic bold or bold exclusively, i.e. all bold.

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Thanks for these explanations, Gary. I will experiment some more, taking them into account—including your remarks about 4 variants of the same font-family. Certainly, @elixirgraphics’s input would be most welcome, as well.

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I have no experience using the Scribe stack. Today is the first I’ve heard of it. That said, if you setup your font in Typeface, and then apply it to your Base Font and Headers in the main Foundry Control Center stack, it should be applied to everything on the page, as @webdeersign pointed out. You don’t need to re-apply the font using other stacks. In fact you’d not want to use other stacks to load the fonts as you’re then likely to run into problems.

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Thank you, Adam, for confirming Gary’s remarks. I will continue my experiments.

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Just to let you know: I started using warehoused fonts for Scribe and everything works now.

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