Hi, all. I recently had a problem crop up at my office - text within a .cdr file that I was working on cooperatively with a co-worker displayed differently on our computers. It turned out that we had different versions of the main font that was used in the file; they looked more or less the same, but subtle differences in the versions added up, resulting in a noticeably different look when it was opened on each of our PCs.
So, my question is, are different font versions a common problem? I wouldn't have thought to look for this as the source of the difficulty, but someone over at the CorelDraw newsgroup suggested that I look at the "modified" dates on each version of the font, and sure enough they were different. Once my coworker and I had the same version of the font, the problem went away.
Hello Matt,
since aeons ago, different foundries have made their own renditions or -in the worst scenarios- copycats of fonts classical and new. I think every existing foundry in the world has its own Garamond version, for example. Sometimes the name of the font changes, but the way the font creator programme handles them gives the user the impression of the same name, hence the name/version confusion. Add to that that sometimes foundries update their fonts, either adding glyphs or making improvements to the existing ones or changing their format (happens a lot nowadays, since TT and T1 are being abandoned in favour of OT). The best you can do is to generate a shared folder among your colleagues and deposit there your core fonts, so everybody will be on the same track. Just be sure that the ones on this folder are the best of the doubled ones you got.
If you both use CorelDRAW then the differens of fonts would only differ if you have different versions of CorelDRAW I guess. But I have never heard though that different versions of CorelDRAW would have different font versions. I guess someone from Corel could answer about this, or some other great wizkid/girl could enlighten us. That said, yes generally different font version, regardless of Computer versions can be very common. Especially among graphic designers working with fonts.
Thanks Foster,Although I had not heard about this issue regarding different versions of coreldraw, I did have a hunch it would be as you said. Great to learn something new.
Thanks to everyone who responded; it's quite common in my office for two or more of us to work on a file before it is done, so we'll have to work on reconciling all of our font versions in-house. It's distressing that different font versions are evidently so widespread; our print vendor typically prints directly from the native .cdr file that we send them; we send them the appropriate fonts, but there's still the possibility that they could print something using their version of a font, which could be subtly different from our version, and throw the whole thing off! What a nuisance.