March 2008 Archives

One of the things I really enjoy about my job is when we get to do things, large or small, that help other font vendors as well as customers.

We have a bunch of icons which are used on the Adobe web site to identify different character set coverage and the presence of various OpenType typographic goodies in our fonts. A year or two ago I mentioned that we would be happy to share them with other font vendors, and a few people wrote me to take me up on my offer. But we've updated the icons since then. Now I'm able to offer for download not only the GIF files, but also the outline fonts we used to create them, and a useful readme about the icons.

The 2008 conference of the International Typographic Association (ATypI) will take place in St Petersburg, Russia, September 17-21. The deadline for talk proposals for both the main track and the TypeTech Forum is Thursday, March 27th. Details here.

[UPDATE March 27th: Deadline extended to Monday, April 14th.]

For the TypeTech Forum section of the conference, I also welcome any proposals for longer workshops, say half-day or full-day, if the topic will be of interest to a sufficient proportion of font developers.

There's a day-and-a-half "Font Business Summit" on April 3-4, hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and organized by the Font Designers Rights Coalition (FDRC).

Adobe today launched a new font package, which I'm very pleased with: Font Folio Education Essentials. We worked with the good people at AIGA (American Institute for the Graphic Arts) to come up with the best bundle we could for educators and students. Estimated street price for this package of 500 fonts is USD $149 for a single user (with volume discounts available for schools). Read about it here.

Microsoft has been hard at work fixing a couple of bugs Windows PowerPoint 2007 has in working with OpenType CFF ("PostScript" flavored OpenType) fonts.

The first is pretty serious. Set text above 64 point in an OpenType CFF font, and it all munges together, overlapping. It's basically unreadable and unusable at these sizes.