Dear Apple: It is a triumph of engineering and marketing and general cause for joy that Apple provides highly functional iPad versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers for a mere $9.99 apiece. Alas, the iPad versions’ inability to import or transfer fonts diminishes the apps’ value and utility.
You, Apple, have done much to foster today’s design culture, so it is no surprise to you that we designers are particular about the fonts we use. One font is not the same as another. Helvetica is not the same as Franklin or Gotham. You know this as well as we do. Which means you also know that, in transferring Keynote presentations and Pages layouts between the Macs and iPads you sell us, our joy gets dented when the iPad replaces our fonts with “a close match” or Helvetica.
And it’s not just a matter of joy. I sometimes spend weeks on a Keynote presentation, and so do my colleagues. We’d love to be able to work on them whether we have a Mac or an iPad at hand—that, after all, is the promise of the devices we buy from you; frankly, it is the promise of all computers. But when the iPad loses my fonts, it loses me. A Keynote presentation with substitute fonts is of no use to me, except perhaps as a rehearsal tool—and I can just as easily rehearse with a PDF.
Please either add the ability to retain fonts (and all their settings) when importing Keynote, Pages, and Numbers documents from computer to iPad, or else please create a simple font management tool for the iPad that allows us to import a reasonable subset of our fonts to the device.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Zeldman
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