When we see the expan­sive super­fam­ily that FF Meta has become, it’s hard to believe its begin­nings were so humble. As the family has known three dif­fer­ent incar­na­tions, there tends to be some con­fu­sion about which ver­sion is which. So let’s clear the air and explore the his­tory of the most suc­cess­ful human­ist sans of the pre­vi­ous decade, “the Hel­vetica of the nineties”.

Orig­i­nally, back in 1991 when the second batch of Font­Fonts was released, there was FF Meta (Normal, Bold, Small Caps). One of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of FF Meta — and Font­Fonts in gen­eral — was the pres­ence of hang­ing (or old­style) fig­ures and addi­tional ff-​ligatures in the “reg­u­lar” Normal and Bold weights, while lining fig­ures were found in the Small Caps weight. The dis­tinc­tive Meta arrow occu­pied the slots for the lesser-​than and greater-​than symbols.

The first expan­sion came in 1992 with FF Meta 2, adding three more weights (Italic, Italic Small Caps, Bold Small Caps).

FF Meta­Plus (not “Meta Plus” as it’s often mistyped), released in 1993, was the big leap for­ward. It intro­duced three new weights — which effec­tively tripled the number of fonts to 18 — and included a fine-​tuning of some char­ac­ters (most notably a cor­rec­tion of the cross­bar on the lc ‘t’) and revi­sions of spac­ing and kern­ing. The family at that point fea­tured Normal, Book, Medium, Bold and Black weights, all in Roman, Italic, Small Caps and Italic Small Caps (except for the Black weight which didn’t include Small Caps). Still hang­ing fig­ures in the ‘reg­u­lar’ weights and lining fig­ures in the Small Caps. The latter fea­tured the Meta arrow, while lesser-​than and greater-​than sym­bols were added to the “reg­u­lar” fonts.

Even­tu­ally, in 1998 it was back to FF Meta. This saw a reor­gan­i­sa­tion of the family into sub­fam­i­lies: FF Meta Normal, FF Meta Book, FF Meta Medium, FF Meta Bold and FF Meta Black, all in Roman, Italic, Small Caps and Italic Small Caps, which all got cou­pled with their respec­tive Expert and Lining Fig­ures weights: yep, a whop­ping 60 fonts indeed. Biggest change this time was the addi­tion of the Black Small Caps, and moving of the extra lig­a­tures (ff, ffi, ffl which were pre­vi­ously in the “reg­u­lar” fonts) to the new Expert fonts. And of course the Lining fig­ures weights meant that you don’t have to switch between “reg­u­lar” fonts and Small Caps fonts any­more to get the desired type of numerals.

Of course the story doesn’t end there, as the latest — and defin­i­tive — incar­na­tion of FF Meta got sub­se­quently expanded with for­eign lan­guage ver­sions, a Con­densed family, addi­tional light weights (Light, Hair­line, and Thin) and just recently a group of Head­line cuts.

So, to con­clude — never mix the orig­i­nal six weight FF Meta with FF Meta­Plus nor the new FF Meta family, as it has dif­fer­ent spac­ing and kern­ing, and some redesigned char­ac­ters. Sub­sti­tut­ing FF Meta for FF Meta­Plus is rec­om­mended, but keep in mind that ff-​ligatures will dis­ap­pear and types of numer­als might differ.

[ Editor’s note: If you’re stuck with old FF Meta­Plus, there is a free upgrade path (minus a small han­dling charge) to FF Meta. Just have your proof-of-purchase handy and give us a ring. If you are involved in any sort of doc­u­ment col­lab­o­ra­tion we highly advise upgrad­ing for two big rea­sons: 1. Using the most cur­rent font data con­sis­tently across your work­flow is always best. 2. FontShop cannot guar­an­tee the avail­abil­ity of FF Meta­Plus in the future. — Stephen ]