Font Frustration

Some of my more recent posts have been about creating Design Space-compatible designs using Hebrew (and Yiddish) words and lettering on the computer. Using my computer and Adobe Creative Suite to create in a non-Western character set has been a bit of a learning curve (and a bit of a pain even after that learning curve has been mastered), but it's doing the job as long as I'm at home and using full sheets of cuttable materials.

The problem is, I need to be able to edit, design, and prototype on the road — and for that, I need to be able to create in Hebrew and Yiddish from my iPad. Design Space doesn't like it when you don't have the same typefaces loaded on all your devices, and either refuses to open a project or replaces your custom typefaces with something stupid like Arial or Cricut Sans. So, I needed to load my Hebrew typefaces onto my iPad.

To add fonts to the iPad, you need to download a font manager app (such as iFont), and you need to know how to get to a directory into which you will store (or have stored) your fonts. (Mine are stored on my OneDrive, which is accessible from most of my iPad apps.) The process is a bit tedious as you have to download the file to your font manager, click on the file in the Font create a new System Profile for each typeface, even though you're not using the new typeface as your system font (the generic typeface that shows up in all your menus, folder names, instruction sets, etc). I downloaded a large portion of the typefaces available through the Open Siddur Project as well as a number of free Google Fonts. I also enabled Hebrew language editing on Swype and Apple Keyboard, and downloaded even another Hebrew-friendly keyboard.

Finally, I opened Design Space and attempted to load a project which included Hebrew text. I got a "missing fonts" error, even though I had the same typeface loaded on my iPad as I did on my PC. When the project loaded, Hebrew type was replaced by large rectangles with Flintstones-looking question-marks inside them. I tried editing the text, but the editor refused to let me do anything other than open a new text box. I chose a Hebrew-containing typeface and typed in Hebrew. Despite entering text right-to-left in the text box, Design Space rendered it left-to-right, another batch of Flintstones question marks. I tried another typeface, and got Eastern European codepage characters. No matter what I tried, I could not accurately enter a single Hebrew or Yiddish character in Design Space for iOS.

I went back and forth with Cricut user support on this. Their stance on the matter was "Design Space only supports the English language", and that the language-support blurb in the App Store meant only "that the app will show up as available if in the countries where that language is common".



Sorry, that answer is confusing at best — but I don't know if that error is Apple's or Cricut's. Meanwhile, the best I could do was get a tech to pass on the request to the development team. And relegate my non-English design development to Windows.