Plantin font?

[Woody44]

I recently read an older book from the U.K. that was set in a 9-point font on 10-point leading. That's pretty small, but even with my aging eyes it was still readable. (Not ideal, and would not be readable in dim light, but okay in good light.) The font is Plantin -- a typeface I had never heard of.

Is there a Plantin clone in the Megafont NOW collection? Possibly Placid?

Thank you.

[pedrober]

Yes, it's Placid.

[Woody44]

Thank you!

It's a rather nice looking font. I may try it in a book I'm currently writing.

Placid Pro includes Regular and Medium, but no bold. Do you know if, when using Placid Pro Regular and you select Bold in your word processor -- do you get Placid Pro Medium, or does the computer ignore the presence of Placid Pro Medium and do a computer-generated Bold from the Regular font?

[pedrober]

Don't use "fake" bold, use the medium version as bold (and medium italic as bold italic). I suppose automatic selection of the medium version as bold depends on the software you are using (for example, Affinity Publisher does that). Anyhow, this font lacks some characters used in European languages and it's useless for me.

[Woody44]

Considering that SoftMaker is in Europe, it is both surprising and disappointing that their Placid font lacks European language characters.

Come on, SoftMaker -- you need to up your game.

[lgsl]

Indeed. There are no cháracters for á é í ó ú ñ and so on...

[Woody44]

Indeed. There are no cháracters for á é í ó ú ñ and so on...

Well, drat!

Candidly, in my opinion that makes the font effectively useless.

[lgsl]

Yes. I double checked by opening the font files with Font Forge. There are plenty of characters missing. Basically it will only work fine with the English language. Spanish, French, Italian, and most likely also German are out of the picture.

[lgsl]

As an alternative to Plantin you could use Francisco Serial. Francisco has all the characters that are missing from Placid, however Francisco Serial, as most Serials in MegaFont it lacks italics.

[Woody44]

As an alternative to Plantin you could use Francisco Serial. Francisco has all the characters that are missing from Placid, however Francisco Serial, as most Serials in MegaFont it lacks italics.

Yes -- and this is a major failing of Megafont NOW. So many of the fonts (typefaces) are incomplete, either not including foreign (accented) characters, or not including true bold, italic, and bold italic variants. Such fonts are essentially useless to most people who would have any need to purchase fonts other than what comes with their Windows or Mac computer. Even in English, the English language has assimilated a number of foreign (especially French, and increasingly also Spanish) words that not being able to type them with the correct accents renders the fonts superfluous.

Megafont NOW has been a great disappointment to me, both because of this and the fact that SoftMaker advertises it falsely. (It is advertised as licensed for all commercial purposes -- but here on this forum they tell us that the fonts are NOT licensed for use in e-books, which is what most authors are selling these days. If that's not a "commercial purpose," what is?)

[pedrober]

I have been doing some research and I've found that Plantin fonts published by major companies don't include support for kerning European accented characters. For example, "a" has numerous kerning pairs but "á" has none. Shocking. They are useless too for me. Then, it's more honest no to include those characters as Softmaker does in Placid Pro font.

[lgsl]

I have been doing some research and I've found that Plantin fonts published by major companies don't include support for kerning European accented characters. For example, "a" has numerous kerning pairs but "á" has none. Shocking. They are useless too for me. Then, it's more honest no to include those characters as Softmaker does in Placid Pro font.

This is interesting. I do not think, however, that SoftMaker should honor the original limitations of Plantin in Placid Pro, since Placid is not meant to be an exact copy, stroke by stroke, hence why they name it differently and adding acented characters would be a great addition. They could have named it Plantin Pro or something if this was the case, after all, no one owns the rights of Platin anymore.

[pedrober]

Of course, I completely agree. Anyhow, I am socked: how it's possible to charge the amount of money Adobe, Linotype etc. charge for their fonts and not to support kerning in European accented characters!!! Obviously, this problem also affects Softmaker fonts but no comparison in terms of quality/price relationship.