October 2005 Archives

I was planning on making my next post about contextual alternates and features in OpenType. Instead, I'm writing today because I'm really tired, and want to say that one complaint I've heard from some font developers is largely true.

Some typeface designers have been saying in the last year or two, in posts on Typophile and elsewhere, that there's one main problem with making fonts that have tons of typographic features and extended language support. It's a whole bunch more work to make such fonts. They don't think they can charge enough extra to make it worth the extra work. Plus, they end up spending more time on fewer designs, and the proportion of their type design time that's spent creatively is going down. But it's a general trend, and some feel they don't have much choice but to go along with it.

Note: if you don't already know about OpenType, read one or more of the following.

• this post on phasing out Type 1 has a good brief summary
  
• Adobe's intro material
  
• our User Guide
  
• my more technical article on font formats
  

So, I've been sitting here the last week working hard on my upcoming typeface, Hypatia Sans™ Pro Most of what I've been doing is the thrilling, death-defying task of assembling accented characters using composites and mark attachment in FontLab Studio 5. Somewhere along the way, I got a bit worn out, and I am wanting to express my commiseration with my fellow type designers and offer a few thoughts about the challenges we face in this "brave new world"....

Recently, I've spoken at a couple of conferences, and made presentations to several key customers, about Adobe phasing out sales of Type 1 ("PostScript") fonts. This posting is adapted from my talks and presentations on the subject.

[Update 14 Oct 2007: We still haven't stopped selling Type 1 fonts yet, although probbaly 85-90% of our sales are in OpenType. But pretty much everything else I've written below remains true. I sure wouldn't buy a font in Mac or Windows Type 1 or Mac TrueType format today unless I had a very specific reason for it. - T]

It seems like these days I go to, and usually speak at, at least three type conferences a year. Each is quite different in strengths and flavor. As I prepare to go to my third and final type conference of the year, the St Bride conference in London next week, it gets me thinking about the general topic. So here I present my thoughts on each one's strengths and differences.

I can't pretend this is a completely objective analysis: I count the people behind all of these conferences as friends and colleagues, I'm on the board of directors of ATypI, and there's a conference I've never been to (TypoBerlin). But I genuinely like all the ones I've attended, while still appreciating their differences.

Here are my capsule reviews on the various conferences....

I'm Adobe's product manager for fonts and global typography. Some might wonder how I got here - this posting is for those few inquisitive souls.

I started in DTP in the mid-80s, so my early background is as an end user, and I try very hard to retain this perspective. I gradually became more and more interested in typography and fonts in particular. Finally, I bought a font editor, and I was immediately hooked. I was working a full-time day job, and spending another 20 hours a week designing fonts. Ultimately this led me to choose typography and printing over a career in journalism, psychology or the theater (my undergraduate degree was in psychology, I worked full-time in commercial theater for a couple of stints in the mid and late 80s, and I was news editor of the university newspaper in my last year of undergrad). It was in this early period that I wrote versions of my essay "A brief history of Type" (which I have an unfinished rewrite of sitting on my laptop).

So in 1995-96 I went to the school of printing at RIT, the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology, and got my MS in printing, specializing in design and typography....

This blog will contain my musings on the technical, business, historical and design aspects of type/fonts and their technologies, including OpenType and SING.

I'm not making any promises about future topics, but here's the list I made of things I'm thinking of covering in future posts. Feel free to comment on which of these topics you'd like to see, or other subjects you'd like to see covered.

• why type matters
  
• User Interface issues for fonts
  
• Type conferences (ATypI, TypeCon, St Bride, etc.)
  
• Type 1 phase-out & font conversion FAQ
  
• Elements of font quality
  
• OpenType contextual font features: enabling great script fonts and much weirdness
  
• SING (& why we should care for western fonts)
  
• OpenType goes open
  
• Copy-protection and fonts
  
• CoolType & ClearType font rendering (incl. Avalon CFF rasterizer)
  
• CID fonts: what are they, why are they in my PDF, and why won't they print?
  
• Hypatia Sans, my first retail typeface design
  
• OpenType Stylistic Sets: more freedom for type designers