Mac and PC Questions

1. Can I transfer a Quark document with foreign language fonts between PC and Mac and vice versa?

2. What is the difference between how Mac and Windows environments organize fonts?

3. Why do I have font troubles when opening Mac-produced documents on a PC and what can I do about them?


1. Can I transfer a Quark document with foreign language fonts between PC and Mac and vice versa?
Yes, but the text will usually be distorted. This is due to differences in font encoding and font formats as well as to static import filters. To get around this problem, you can use an ASCII text converter or similar tool.
This problem will not occur anymore when using OpenType fonts and a version of Quark, that is able to handle OpenType fonts with multi language character sets.



2. What is the difference between how Mac and Windows environments organize fonts?
PC:
I installed my fonts but only some of them appear in the Fonts menu. What happened?
Windows: Unlike on the Macintosh, font styles are classified in “families” under Windows. A type family can contain a maximum of four members, for example, regular, italic, bold and bold italic. One of these is specified as the default font. Only this default font appears in the Font menus of application programs. The three other variations are linked to the default font and are only activated by selecting the font styles “italic”, “bold” and “bold italic”, for instance, with the buttons in a MSWord window.

Example: You have installed Frutiger Light, Frutiger LightItalic, Frutiger Bold and Frutiger BoldItalic, however only Frutiger 45 Light appears in the font menu of the application program. Select the following settings in your application program in order to obtain the individual styles.

Desired font style: Frutiger 45 Light
Font to be selected: Frutiger 45 Light
Font style to be selected: normal, regular

Desired font style: Frutiger 46 Light Italic
Font to be selected: Frutiger 45 Light
Font style to be selected: Italic

Desired font style: Frutiger 65 Bold
Font to be selected: Frutiger 45 Light
Font style to be selected: Bold

Desired font style: Frutiger 66 Bold Italic
Font to be selected: Frutiger 45 Light
Font style to be selected: Bold Italic or Bold and Italic

Mac
Mac fonts can be organized by family but unlike on a PC, you can also organize them by their individual names. That is, you can link the family together with the style buttons, but when you choose a particular font from the folder, you can see that you are choosing Frutiger 65 Bold.



3. Why do I have font troubles when opening Mac-produced documents on a PC and what can I do about them?
The easiest way to obtain a font that allows swapping documents from Mac to PC and vice-versa is to create it using an OpenType font. However, the required operation systems needed to run OpenType fonts are Mac OS X and Windows XP/2000 or newer.