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Jonathan Edwards on "Times Reader take two"
Thanks for this post. I must say that I find Times Reader 2 to be much less readable than the previous version, for two reasons. First, the large font setting is still not large enough for me. As with all ...
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Narration on "Times Reader take two"
A very interesting article, Miguel, and I am glad you got a chance to contribute to the future of the NYTimes. I would like to say that the mysteries you ran into on screen font appearance are not new ones ...
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YL on "A new face for Adobe"
It's good news to see Adobe having its own font. It would be nice to see this typeface elsewhere. "Adobe Clean Serif" sounds strange to me. I can't quite imagine what will a serif version looks like. There is one ...
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Sandee Cohen on "A new face for Adobe"
It's a nice typeface, but I wish they would give Myriad Pro a real small caps OpenType style like Adobe Clean has. The wimpy electronic small caps is awful. [Sandee, I hear your pain! The good news is that we ...
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typolion on "A new face for Adobe"
sorry guys, ok- it's a nice mix between gil and dax (not really good: small g and small k) but who needs another look-a-like font, certainly not a company as adobe! this is a heavy, extended disappointment. [I'm sorry it ...
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Christoph Koeberlin on "A new face for Adobe"
Thank you David. But what I wanted to ask is: Will it still be possible to mix UC with small caps after Adobe decided to ignore smcp feature and make a case conversion before applying c2sc? [The case-conversion behavior Christoph ...
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May 13, 2009
Times Reader take two
The Times Reader 2.0 released this week is a newsreader powered by AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) that was developed by Adobe in partnership with The New York Times Company. I contributed to the project; more about that later. It is a groundbreaking application that feels like a breath of fresh air amid all the unfortunate news affecting many newspapers across the country and worldwide.
May 5, 2009
A new face for Adobe
You've seen it in the "mnemonic logos" and splash screens of Adobe's Creative Suite 3 and 4, and perhaps you wondered what that typeface was. After more than 25 years in the type development business, Adobe decided to have its own corporate typeface family. The Creative Suite uses were early versions of a family designed by Robert Slimbach. Now that it's been officially adopted at Adobe, I can tell you about our latest design, called Adobe Clean. There's no plan to make it available for licensing, but you'll be seeing more of it in Adobe materials and products as time goes on.
February 20, 2009
Introducing the CJK Type blog
For those who were not aware, late last year we launched the CJK Type blog, which is meant to focus on CJK-related aspects of type (hence its name).
February 6, 2009
Paul Hunt Joins Adobe Type Team
Yesterday marked the first month anniversary of my joining the type team here at Adobe, so I thought that I would briefly introduce myself to those who don’t know me.
I grew up in the rural north-west corner of Arizona in a town of about twelve hundred persons, on the border of the Navajo Nation. At a young age I became fascinated with the languages and cultures of peoples at home and abroad, and poured over encyclopedia articles illustrating the writing systems of ancient civilizations. I studied Spanish and Russian languages on and off from middle school through college, although I would say that I am now only conversationally fluent in either. I entered Brigham Young University intending on getting my degree in Russian language. Part of the reason I attended BYU was that I wanted to perform with its International Folk Dancing Ensemble, which I did (just not on the tour team). It was while in college that I developed a taste for everything Indian: the food, the music, the festivals, and especially Bollywood cinema.
January 27, 2009
AFDKO 2.5 is released!
A new release of the FDK, AFDKO 2.5, has been posted at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/
This release finally brings the FDK tools fully up to par with the OpenType specification. The most notable new features are that the FDK now fully supports all GSUB and GPOS lookup categories, and can apply the feature file directives to TTF source fonts to build TTF fonts with OpenType layout tables. The power of the FDK command-line tools can now be applied to building fonts for all scripts, including complex scripts such as Arabic and Indic.
AFDKO 2.5 also supports several of the newer OpenType features: user-friendly names for stylistic set features, and expanded lookup flag settings for use with mark classes. In addition, for CJK fonts, the tools now support Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVSes).
If you're someone who builds or tests fonts, please try it out! (Installation is now working better as well, and there is a command file for Windows that avoids the earlier need to edit environment variables). Note that the AFDKO is tools are all command-line based, and and require some willingness to get technical.
- Read Roberts
Say Hi to the type team
I want to offer my sincere thanks to Thomas Phinney for all the work he put into this blog. But despite his absence, "the blog must go on." Everyone on the Adobe Type Development team will be contributing interesting bits about fonts and type technology. Some of them may be unfamiliar to some of you, so I'll take this opportunity to offer a brief introduction.
Robert Slimbach has been designing typefaces for 25 years. He's responsible for the design quality of the type library in general and the Adobe Originals series in particular. Robert's designs have won numerous awards, including the Prix Charles Peignot and six TDC2 awards. He was instrumental in moving Adobe's fonts toward broader language coverage, and was an early promoter for contextual layout and support for optical sizes in text families. designer profile
Ken Lunde is an authority on East Asian text handling and font technologies. His book "CJKV Information Processing", now in its second edition, is a standard reference in the industry (catalog). Among many other accomplishments, Ken helped to define Unicode's first Ideographic Variation Sequence registry.
Read Roberts develops and maintains the tools we use to make our fonts, including the AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) that we offer for free download (AFDKO site).
Nicole Minoza is our program manager, moving various projects along when she's not running marathons or doing programming herself. She was a Political Science major (with a side in Computer Science) and is now working on her MBA.
Ernie March has worked on fonts for 25 years, many of them at Adobe. He handles most of our font testing, doubles as our release engineer, and occasionally finds time to help with font development.
Gu Hua is a recent addition to the team. She has worked on East Asian fonts for more than 12 years. Now she tests our East Asian fonts and related technologies.
Christopher Slye is the team lead for font development. He's both a typeface designer and font technician. He maintains the databases we use to build our fonts, and was responsible for overhauling all our fonts to bring them up to current best practices. designer profile
Miguel Sousa got his MA in Typeface Design in 2005 from the University of Reading, where his Calouste design won a TDC2 award. He helps develop our newer font families, and is our in-house expert on Flash & Flex. Miguel serves as the main "answer guy" for font technical questions both inside and outside the company in forums like Typophile.
Paul D. Hunt became fascinated with languages and cultures early in life. This eventually led to a BA in International Studies. Paul's affinity for languages and design then converged in typeface design. He landed an internship with P22, which turned into a multi-year job. Paul went on to hone his type craft at the University of Reading, where he graduated with merit from the Masters program in Typeface Design in 2008, then joined the Adobe team in January 2009. In addition to basic Latin, Paul has designed typefaces for Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari and typefaces with extended Latin coverage to support African and American Indian languages. He is a frequent contributor to (and moderator for) Typophile, and helps maintain its wiki.
And of course I'm here too. I fell in love with letterforms in the 1970s, which led to a degree in graphic design. After working in the publishing industry I joined the Adobe type team in 1986, and have been involved with our font development, tools and technologies ever since. I originally hoped to design type, but found I could make more of a difference managing the team and doing things like helping to define the behavior of OpenType layout features.
Adobe also has a Type Development team in Tokyo, led by Taro Yamamoto with font technologist Masataka Hattori and typeface designer Ryoko Nishizuka. designer profile We'll have more about their work in another post.
We're all looking forward to more communication with each of you as our work here continues to evolve.
- David Lemon
December 11, 2008
Text Layout Framework rasterization - and goodbye
I was recently asked regarding the Text Layout Framework for Flash and AIR: "It seems to be using system rasterizer (producing different results on Mac v Windows) but flattens output to grayscale. Is that correct? If so does/will Flash expose system rendering as an option or always use its own rasterizer? Or is the Text Layout Framework completely separate from Flash?"
November 21, 2008
Flash/AIR Text Layout Framework public beta
Adobe today released a public pre-release version of the Text Layout Framework (TLF) on Adobe Labs. This is very good news for anybody working much with text in the Flash or AIR environments.
What is the Text Layout Framework? It's an extensible ActionScript library for use with Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5, It lives on top of the new text engine found in these products, and exposes the power of this text engine in exciting new ways, including:
September 25, 2008
Creative Suite 4 (CS4) fonts
For folks doing an upgrade, the CS4 font list looks a lot like CS3, except for a few fonts removed, and a new registration incentive: the complete Sanvito Pro family (there will be a new landing page for this family, but it's not up yet). Sanvito Pro is a versatile informal script face with four weights and four optical size variants for each weight, for a total of 16 fonts.
Typefaces you might have seen in CS3 that aren't in CS4: Arno Pro, Bickham Script Pro, Garamond Premier Pro. Further typefaces bundled with InDesign CS3 but not InDesign CS4: Bernhard Modern Std, Caflisch Script Pro.
There are more East Asian fonts, notably:
- Adobe Kaiti Std and Adobe Fangsong Std, additional simplified Chinese fonts
- With InDesign and suites including InDesign, the "Pr6N" versions of the Kozuka Gothic and Kozuka Mincho typefaces. These fonts have the Adobe-Japan1-6 character set, and are JIS-2004 savvy.
All in all, still a LOT of fonts, just a slightly smaller set.
September 20, 2008
Speaking engagements: London UK, Baltimore MD, western Canada
I am in the midst of a lot of public speaking right now. The last few days it's been at the ATypI conference in St Petersburg, Russia (where, to my considerable surprise, I was one of a number of recipients of a medal from the Russian government last night - it's a strange world, friends).
Monday night (tomorrow) at the InDesign User Group in London, England, I'll be doing an updated version of my favorite talk: Typography for Humans. "Traditonal typography was restricted by mechanical limitations. However, the digital technology of OpenType has spawned fonts which celebrate the human hand and the human mind, from random elements that mimic handwriting and calligraphy, to fonts that translate themselves, censor themselves, or predict the future. Along the way, fine typography is largely automated. But it is still easy to create typography which, in favoring aesthetics or tradition over legibility, fails to achieve its basic purpose of communication. Thomas Phinney explores and demonstrates these human and anti-human developments on the frontiers of digital typography, with typefaces created by himself, his Adobe colleagues, and others around the world."
Admission is free, and if it's like other IDUG meetings I've been to, so is the pizza. :)
October 18th, at the AIGA "Social Studies" conference (graphic design education conference) in Baltimore, I'll be doing a short talk on legibility in typography.
October 23rd, I'll be giving the same talk as the London one above, at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.
October 27th I'll be speaking at the University of Lethbridge (Canada).
As part of this late October road trip, I may also line up something in Calgary and possibly Vancouver as well... TBD. Let me know if you have any suggestions of people I should work with to arrange such a talk. :)
September 11, 2008
Arial Narrow gets fixed
Arial Narrow is fixed! No longer will it be reproducing like crazy... no, wait, not that kind of fix.
Users of many Adobe applications such as InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop have been noticing for a while that the version of the four Arial Narrow fonts that ship with Office 2007 and Windows Vista had a problem. They didn't show up correctly in the font menus of these Adobe applications. Instead of four styles of Arial Narrow showing up, there would be just one. It was however under the main "Arial" family, unlike the older version of Arial Narrow.
Basically, Microsoft tried to enhance the font menu names for the family, but inadvertently gave all four fonts the same style of just "Narrow" rather than the needed "Narrow Italic" and so on. We worked with them to identify the problem and how to fix it, and they've now released the fixed fonts. These will doubtless show up in some future service pack(s) for Office and/or Windows, but until then, follow that link for a "Hotfix."
ADDENDUM: [added 12 Sep 2008] The process of installing the new fonts may confuse the Adobe font caches. As my colleague Dov Isaacs put it, "The trick is that you need to rebuild the Adobe font cache mechanism. First, exit all Adobe programs. Then, search and delete ALL files of the form AdobeFnt##.lst where ## is a two digit number."
September 10, 2008
Syntax for OpenType mark attachment?
We’re looking for some feedback from the font developer community on how you want the AFDKO/FontLab/FontMaster code syntax to work for mark attachment. Please comment! Comments received by Friday September 29th will be most likely to influence our implementation.
In OpenType fonts, mark attachment is the GPOS (glyph positioning) rule which dynamically positions diacritical marks (accents and the like) relative to base characters or other marks.
The currently available version of Adobe’s Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO) does not support OpenType mark attachment. Hence, other tools based on the AFDKO, such as FontLab or DTL FontMaster, do not support it either. We’re currently implementing such support, which will in turn determine the underlying code used by such third party tools. This also means extending the syntax of the AFDKO language to represent mark attachment. However, mark attachment is complicated, and gets even more so when one makes it contextual. The best way to represent it in the same style as other AFDKO code is not entirely clear. Here’s what we’d like your feedback on.
(Special thanks to Read Roberts, AFDKO engineer, for the remainder of this post!)
September 1, 2008
Adobe, Web fonts and EOT
Adobe is strongly supportive of the effort to make Microsoft’s EOT web font format an open standard. Indeed, Adobe pays for Steve Zilles’ time, and he will be chairing the EOT standardization effort, should the W3C accept the proposal in principle. We will be updating our licensing FAQ to make it clear that our existing font license terms allow EOT usage, and do not allow linking to original fonts placed on web servers.
Why do we support EOT? Our surveys of web designers and font developers have made it clear to us that users want an HTML/CSS font solution that allows them to use any font they want, and most of them would like to do so legally. In particular, they want to be able to use regular retail and OS-bundled fonts. With original fonts on web servers, hardly any retail or commonly-used fonts could legally be used; only freeware and open source fonts, some shareware, and a handful of retail fonts.
Some open source advocates argue that there are enough and good enough free/libre and open source fonts available that retail/commercial fonts are unnecessary. Whether they are right in principle or not (and I think not, given how few such fonts are decently made and come in even a basic set of four styles with bold, italic and bold italic), it doesn't matter: the web designers who make web sites want to be able to use a vastly wider variety of fonts, and companies and organizations that have a web presence want to use their existing visual identity online, or at least a close adaptation. Being able to use 50% of the world's fonts instead of 5% comes a lot closer to meeting these needs.
Why is it so? EOT comes vastly closer because many more type foundries and type designers are comfortable with EOT than are comfortable with original fonts on Web servers. And that includes Adobe.
August 31, 2008
Character set terms defined
Over on Typophile, Nick Shinn asked: "What is the difference between a code page, a glyph list, and a Unicode chart?" (By that last I think he meant "Unicode range.") Nick also made some mentions of "encoding" in the same thread, so I thought I would define the whole lot of them. I expect this will be useful to font developers, and perhaps some other folks as well. I've just dashed this off, so I reserve the right to twiddle the descriptions for more accuracy and/or clarity. Especially if my readers point out errors. :)
August 28, 2008
Extended Latin Character Sets
About two years ago I posted my thoughts on extended Cyrillic character sets. Now we're finally ready to talk about future extended Latin character sets, and to better document what we consider to be the existing Latin character sets as well. The largest character sets here (Adobe Latin 4 and Adobe Latin 5) are drafts; I welcome any feedback, especially (though not only) on things that "ought to be in Adobe Latin 5" but aren't there yet.
This post owes a special thanks to my colleague Miguel Sousa, who spent many hours compiling lists based on my spreadsheets and directions, and checked my data repeatedly in various ways. Any errors are probably mine, but he created the linked tables of HTML which are linked from this page, as well as the tab-delimited text files which are linked in turn from those pages.
August 11, 2008
Need a Unicode font?
Every so often I get a request (either from within or outside Adobe) for a "Unicode font." Unfortunately, that term is not very meaningful to me. The obvious interpretations are:
1) To me as a font geek, the phrase "a Unicode font" "logically" means "a font with a unicode encoding (cmap table)." That would be pretty much every one of the 2400+ OpenType fonts Adobe has in our type library. So that interpretation doesn't really narrow things much.
2) They could mean "a font that covers all of Unicode." However, Unicode today has over 100,000 defined code points, and as there is no font format that can include more than 65,535 glyphs, such a font is not technically possible. (There's a separate question as to whether it would be desirable - see below.)
3) They could also mean "a font that covers some useful subset of Unicode that is more than just the basic WinANSI or MacRoman 8-byte (256-character) set." However, for that to be meaningful, they'd have to define exactly what writing systems or languages are important to them.