Please forgive me if this has already been discussed, but it was recently reported to us that there appears to be something fishy going on with the 'System Font' font family in Sierra.
In El Capitan 'System Font' had several weights in Carbon (System Font Regular, Medium, Bold, Italic, Light) which all appeared in the standard Font menu and when iterating over installed fonts using an FMFontFamilyIterator. In Sierra though we seem to have only System Font and System Font Italic. Other weights are still present and accessible by their internal names (e.g., '.SF NS Text Condensed Light') but aren't composited as before into the overall System Font family. Looking over the system_profiler reports it appears San Francisco was converted in Sierra from OpenType to TrueType, and that most of the weights ended up with somewhat less unique Unique Names. For example in El Capitan we had SFNS-Light.otf which system_profiler reported as containing only one Typeface '.SFNSText-Light' having the internal Unique Name of '.SF NS Text Light' (which actually appears to be unique). In Sierra we now instead have SFNSText.ttf containing the Typefaces '.SFNSText', '.SFNSText-Medium', '.SFNSText-Light', '.SFNSText-Semibold', '.SFNSText-Bold', and '.SFNSText-Heavy', ALL of which share the same Unique Name '.SF NS Text' (which obviously is NOT unique). Their Full Names seem to be constructed by just concatenating their Family and Style. In the TTF version of italic (which again is still reported as before in Sierra/Carbon) there are also multiple weights that share one Unique Name, but they're all variants of Italic. Their Full Name appears to be constructed differently, with an extra copy of 'Italic' between the base Family and Style variant. Alas I don't know enough about fonts to understand what (if anything) that difference really means. One of our users who has a TTF editor was investigating this and DL'd and installed the old trial pack of SF fonts, and also opened up the Sierra TTF fonts to examine the innards. Later he swears he found that the missing weights had magically reappeared in his Font menu until he rebooted, then went away again (so far he hasn't managed to figure out the exact steps needed to reproduce this). So just as a first WAG it looks like this might have something to do with how the structure of the family changed during conversion to TTF (and thus not really be a 'code' bug at all). That would be nice I guess (presumably bug fixes that don't actually change any code are easier to justify) but without a TTF editor to muck around with them myself I can't confirm that theory. So first of all does anyone know whether this change was deliberate (and if so what the rationale behind it was)? If not, has anyone else investigated this regression and figured out what's going on? Barring that, can someone more knowledgeable about fonts hazard a better guess than mine? Thanks, -Mark _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Carbon-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/carbon-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
