Cannot find fonts in FCP7

Hello Everyone!

Thank you in advance to anyone reading this.

I am working on a macbook Pro 15", mid 2012 on FCP 7. I want to use Lato font for my video. I have imported the font and have also validated in the fontbook and also eliminated duplicates. In word, photoshop and motion I see all of the many variants of Lato font. But when in FCP7 I only get one "Lato" font and can only choose bold, italic, regular... but not all of its 18 flavors.

Any ideas what I can do to bring all variations of the font into FCP??

I am under time pressure and it would be much easier to use the FCP title function as opposed to importing photoshop titles.

Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Robert

The Lato font collection includes hairline, light, medium, semi-bold, bold and heavy weights. Presumably these are designed with more visual sensitivity than a stroke width generator would produce. So enjoy your 18 variants of Lato font.

The only way I see to do this within FCP7 is to install just the one variant you wish. Then what FCP7 calls Lato "plain" is exactly that Lato variant you've installed.

FCP7 can't handle families of font variants. FCP7 grabs one member of the family to be the "plain", and from this FCP7 cobbles a bold, an italic, and a bold-italic variant. They are not the Lato variants.

The 18 Lato variants come as separate .ttf files, but the family name "Lato" is coded somewhere in each binary file so they always install in that family.

It would be nice if you could merely disable the 17 variants you don't want for a particular title using that Font Book function. But FCP7 ignores Font Book disabling.* (At least it does under OSX 10.8.5 where I tried.) You must really uninstall the 17 to get the one you want.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

*[note added 25 November 2016: Refuted in later posts.]

Dear Dennis,

This works great!! I enabled the one Lato font I wanted and disabled all the other variants of Lato in font book. I close FCP, then reopen it and all the fonts are changed to the current lato font. Thank you so much!!

I have OS 10.8.4. So I should not upgrade to 10.8.5.

Best regards,
Robert

Robert: You're right. The Font Book disabling method does work under 10.8.5 too. I tested incorrectly earlier.

Disabling all but the wanted variant with Font Book is a good general method for utilizing installed font families in FCP7. Lato isn't the only large font family. Avenir has 12 variants, Helvetica Neue has 11 variants, etc. FCP7 does bolding, italicizing and narrowing/condensing of fonts half-decently, but it can't make a hairline/ultrafine variant. These you must midwife from the families.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany