New To CS2: Type Preferences

The second in our three-part series on what’s new to Photoshop CS2 discusses the advances in typography and type handling, including the all-new Type preferences.

A few years ago, back in the days of Photoshop 6, uninformed designers and printers would have laughed if you told them they could output vector type out of Photoshop. With that version of Photoshop, type could remain in its own layer as vector shapes and, if output correctly, would have generated the same vectors as Illustrator or QuarkXPress. Since those days, all the Adobe applications have developed their typography tools as more and more users try to create type in applications other than the standard desktop publishing apps like QuarkXPress and InDesign. Illustrator CS was a large leap forward for that application, but it didn’t happen for Photoshop until now with CS2. If you haven’t had time to explore its new focus on type, you must read this article.

WYSIWYG = WIZZYWIG

Figure 1: A piece of the new Font menu.

It’s about time that Photoshop adopted the same WYSIWYG font menu that Illustrator and InDesign have had for more than a year. For those who don’t know, WYSIWYG is short for “what you see is what you get” and it lets you see the typeface in action before applying it to your type layer. In Figure 1 above you can see it to the right of the menu. If you haven’t changed the Font Preview Size setting in the Type preferences, your previews are probably like mine: readable for some, maybe not so much for others. We’ll get to the remedy later on.

Also very important is the font type icon, which you see to the left of the font name. In Figure 1, the three types of font files—PostScript Type 1, TrueType and OpenType, from top to bottom—are denoted by icons which you should get to know. If you ever have a problem using a font in a layout, this may be the reason why. For those who don’t know the various types of fonts, here is a list:

• PostScript Type 1 fonts are the oldest of the three font types and considered the most stable and supported. You’ll find a lot of Type 1 fonts in most agencies and quality print shops.
• TrueType fonts were developed by Apple and Microsoft in the early 1990s to compete with Adobe’s PostScript Type 1 fonts. Adobe charged licensing fees for their fonts so the goal with TrueType was to create an open standard. PostScript never did lose their top standing but Adobe did stop the licensing fees so I guess it’s a good thing. TrueType is still used a lot in the system fonts for both Macintosh and Windows.
• OpenType was developed by Adobe and Microsoft to merge the PostScript Type 1 and TrueType formats and end the bickering between the companies. What resulted was a font format that is cross-platform, hold many more glyphs (characters) than the other formats and is almost definitely the format to end all formats. However, the technology is only a few years old and not every application supports it fully (Photoshop can).

I am ecstatic that Adobe has improved Photoshop’s Font menu! Despite what those old-school designers and printers said years ago, Photoshop can set type very well and offers tips and tactics you can’t get in a desktop publication application. Photoshop CS2 finally gives us a chance to view our fonts and font formats quickly and effectively.

THE TYPE PREFERENCES

Figure 2: The new Type preferences.

You know preferences have reached a critical mass when Adobe creates a new preferences pane to hold them! That is what happened in CS2 with the new Type preferences: they used to be in the General preferences pane, but the Type preferences grew enough to warrant their own. You can see the Type preferences in Figure 2 above. The only new addition is actually the Font Preview Size drop-down menu, which (you guessed it) controls the size of those WYSIWYG font previews in the Font menu. I usually keep mine on Medium, which gives me a good idea what a typeface looks like. If I do need to see it larger I like to use this tip: create some text, select it and then select the font in the Character palette (or options bar) and press the up or down arrows to scroll through the fonts and see them applied to your text.

The other Type preferences are as follows:

• Use Smart Quotes will replace quotation marks with the proper “curly” typographer’s quotes. Unless you want to declare yourself a type hack, you’ll want this checked.
• Show Asian Text Options will add Chinese, Japanese and Korean type options to your Character and Paragraph palettes, such as text direction.
• Show Font Names In English will display names of non-Roman fonts, such as Cyrillic fonts, with their Roman equivalents.

CONCLUSION

I am a designer who uses a lot of type and loves type, and so I’m very glad that Photoshop is developing some stronger typography tools. It doesn’t have even a half of the features and controls you will find in InDesign CS2, but Photoshop is first and foremost a photo editing application so I’m inclined to forgive. But I hope that as the Creative Suite applications evolve and borrow features from one another, Photoshop will continue to gain ground in typography.

Now if only InDesign could get some of Photoshop’s nifty effects, then I’d be happy…!