Publishing with Accordance fonts

[Helen Brown]

We regularly receive requests from publishers and editors to supply a PC version of our fonts, because they have been sent manuscripts which include these fonts.

 

If the person uses a Mac, there is no problem, he can just pay for Accordance and will have all the fonts. The reality is that most are on a PC and we have to reply in this vein:

 

I am sorry, but we have not been able to port our fonts for use on a PC. There are only four possible solutions to this issue:

1. Use a Mac computer to edit these documents.

 

2. Request that your authors send you the documents as PDF files. This will preserve the fonts, but will make it difficult for you to edit the text. It is easy for them to do this.

 

3. Request that your authors use Unicode fonts in place of our own fonts. This is what they should have done from the beginning! It is easy to export Greek and Hebrew from Accordance as Unicode which is then compatible with all modern computers. Of course, it may be a lot of work for them to go back and copy and paste every fragment of Greek or Hebrew again.

 

4. Write a routine for MSWord that will convert each character of the fonts to the equivalent Unicode character. This is no simple task, especially for Hebrew with the right-to-left issues. I do not recommend it.

It really is up to you, the author, to ensure that your editor and publisher can accept your original language quotations. Unicode is the best option from the beginning, unless you know that they will be satisfied with PDF or can use a Mac.

[R. Mansfield]

Educate me a bit further, Helen.

 

I thought that with the advent of OS X, fonts were now completely interchangeable between Windows and Macs. I know that I've downloaded Windows fonts based on this assumption and they've worked fine.

 

Although I ran VirtualPC for years and now Parallels on my Mac, I guess I never bothered to try to copy the Accordance fonts to the Windows environment, but until your post I would have assumed they would have worked.

[Helen Brown]

Unicode fonts are cross platform, but Accordance fonts are not Unicode and are not transferable. Many Windows fonts are TrueType and work on Mac OS X just fine, but the higher ASCII characters used in our fonts are not accepted on Windows.

[R. Mansfield]

Unicode fonts are cross platform, but Accordance fonts are not Unicode and are not transferable. Many Windows fonts are TrueType and work on Mac OS X just fine, but the higher ASCII characters used in our fonts are not accepted on Windows.

 

That makes sense. I understood the issues relating to Unicode, but for whatever reason thought TrueType fonts were exchangeable across the board.

 

And that also works for way I've been using these fonts over the past few years. For instance, for my dissertation, I've exported to Unicode in case there might ever be a possibility of doing something with the manuscript besides just binding it to go in the library. But for personal work--Bible studies, sermons, or even the Keynote slides I use with the Greek class I'm currently teaching--I prefer Accordance fonts because they look so much nicer.