'Grandpa' font from children's book 'New in Town'

[Meddysong]

I'm pagesetting a translation of New in Town by Marta Altés.

The InDesign file informs me that the main font used is called Grandpa. I've not had any luck in tracking it down, though.

I really like this font and would like to use it or, failing that, work with one which looks similar. Would anybody kindly point me in the right direction?

[Kevin Thompson]

It is a custom font that the publisher (Macmillan) created from the hand lettering of Marta Altés MA thesis project, the book My Grandpa.

So far, no luck finding anything terribly close in a commercial typeface. Canterbury is vaguely similar.

[Meddysong]

55 minutes ago, Kevin Thompson said:

It is a custom font that the publisher (Macmillan) created from the hand lettering of Marta Altés MA thesis project, the book My Grandpa.

A-ha! Since I've licensed the book from Macmillan, I'll drop them a line. Curiously, they do include fonts among the files which they transfer but they never seem to be usable for me.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. I'll report back on what Macmillan say to me.

[Ralf Herrmann]

Looks like old Mac fonts. They are stored in a way where the actual data gets dropped once you move it off the Mac platform. 

[Kevin Thompson]

As a Mac user, I’ve had luck translating older type formats to OpenType using TransType 4 (which also runs on Windows).

[Ralf Herrmann]

Yes, it certainly can be converted. But it needs to be done before moving the font away from the Mac environment. Once the “0 KB” font is received, it’s already destroyed. There is no data there to convert anymore. 

[Kevin Thompson]

I got that, Ralf, but I suspect Meddysong has been dealing with Macmillan’s subsidiary rights or account people, not directly with their art department.

He may have to walk his contact through the process that Macmillan’s design staff will need to follow to convert the fonts to a universal / OpenType format.

Just trying give him some tools to facilitate that.

[Meddysong]

6 hours ago, Kevin Thompson said:

Just trying give him some tools to facilitate that.

And you've done a grand job, thank you, Kevin. I've copied the relevant bits of yours and Ralf's explanations in the hope that it will be of use to my contact when she speaks with the technical team.

I'm now kicking myself to think that had I known of this problem before and found a resolution, my previous Macmillan projects wouldn't have involved sourcing alternative fonts! I figured these broken fonts were just traces to show which ones had been used but couldn't be shared for licensing reasons. Not so, it appears ...