#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING MAC OS X#
#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING SOFTWARE#
#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING CODE#
#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING PLUS#

The operating system vendors now have the Type 1 rasterizer code in their OSes, and it’s up to them whether they support it moving forwards. Of course, a lot of people don’t think of fonts as software, but that’s really what they are: little plug-ins to your system software. We still get occasional tech support calls for an issue that we fixed in two Type 1 font families in 1993!

#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING SOFTWARE#

What other software do you have that you bought in the late 1980s that still works today? It’s amazing that these things have had such a long lifespan.

But when thinking about Type 1 eventually going away, it’s worth keeping in mind the value that customers have gotten from their Type 1 fonts over the years. People expect their fonts to continue to work forever. Nonetheless, we are well aware that there is still a very large installed base of Type 1 fonts. In any case, the overwhelming majority of Adobe font sales today are in the OpenType format, and our Type 1 sales continue to decrease. However, MM fonts still work in Adobe applications, though I wouldn’t want to guess on the likelihood of bug fixes in this area going forwards. This has been true for several years now.Īs a side note, we stopped selling the multiple master flavor of Type 1 fonts several years ago, and stopped active tech support for multiple master fonts at the end of 2005. Now that we have out whole library in OpenType, people really have to go out of their way to get Type 1 fonts. As we converted our type library to OpenType, we made the corresponding Type 1 fonts much less prominent on our web site. However, that doesn’t mean we’ll stop supporting it tomorrow or anything (see below).Īdobe stopped developing new Type 1 fonts in 1999, and introduced its first OpenType fonts in 2000. So, from a technical perspective, Type 1 is a thoroughly obsolete format. OpenType addresses all of these problems. The font files are not cross-platform, and there are multiple files required to represent a single font. It doesn’t have typographic extensions to deal with various languages that require them and to support advanced typography. The special CID flavor of Type 1 gets around this, but only by defining rigid “character collections.” Type 1 also doesn’t use a Unicode encoding. Well, Type 1 does not allow for more than 256 glyphs to be encoded in a single font. We have various information about mapping from Adobe Type 1 to OpenType fonts, both for multiple master Type 1 fonts and for regular Type 1 fonts.

#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING MAC OS X#

They started doing this in Mac OS X and Windows 2000.

options for advanced typographic features, whether needed for linguistic reasons or just for fine typographyĪs part of the same transition to OpenType, Adobe licensed its ATM rasterizer code to Apple and Microsoft at no charge, giving them the ability to offer system-level support for Type 1 and OpenType CFF (“PostScript flavored OpenType”) fonts.

potential for extensive multi-lingual support in a single font, using a Unicode encoding.

Taking the table-based structure of TrueType, OpenType offers several key features: In 1996 we announced OpenType, which was intended to supercede the older formats.

#TRANSTYPE FONT HINTING PLUS#

Plus they didn’t have to pay Adobe royalties on the technology.Īfter a long period of conflict between the two font formats, often referred to as the “Font wars” (cue heroic music here), Adobe and Microsoft decided to bury the hatchet. Apple and Microsoft wanted to have an outline font format that they owned, which would be WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) on screen, and was specially optimized for the low-resolution monitors and black-and-white text imaging of the time. TrueType was developed by Apple and licensed to Microsoft, and introduced around 1991 as well. Because Type 1 was initially supported only by PostScript devices, the format is sometimes itself called “PostScript,” which ignores the fact that there are other font formats supported by PostScript (including TrueType), and that since 1991 it has been possible to print Type 1 fonts to pretty much any printer as well as scale them on-screen. Type 1 is the original multi-platform scalable outline font format, introduced by Adobe in the mid-80s, with the format made fully public around 1991. This is all discussed at much greater length in my article on article on font formats. Here’s a brief introduction to set the scene. This posting is adapted from my talks and presentations on the subject. 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.

Transtype font hinting