Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!rpi!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ginosko!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Lou
From: Lou@cup.portal.com (William Joseph Marriott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager
Message-ID: <23012@cup.portal.com>
Date: 12 Oct 89 09:49:36 GMT
References: <3028@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 77

Mark Vita Writes:

| I think it would be great if Adobe would modify             
| their advertising copy so that instead of reading "13 of the most            
  
| popular fonts", it says "4 of the most popular font families".

I think it would be great, too, because that would mean I could
get more than 102 styles of Helvetica for the price of four.

To be absolutely certain you don't mislead customrs, you'd
actually have to word your improved advertisement something
like, "four each of the most common variations of the three type
families you're used to seeing from LaserWriters, plus one
variation of another font."

The example of sandwiches is colorful, but inappropriate,
because to do an italic font right, you have to go back to the
drawing board and build the font from the ground up. It's *NOT*
like adding a pickle to a sandwich. Otherwise, you would have to
settle for mathematical transformations of the font, instead of
the more aesthetic hand-crafted italics offered by Adobe.
Compare printed italics with the way italics look on your screen
when no true italic screen bitmap is available. Compare
Helvetica Narrow with Helvetica Condensed. You thought "Outline"
was a style? Compare that with the many "Open Face" versions of
some fonts.

Call it crazy, but somehow Adobe makes money off people who care
about those differences.

You'd like to call it the Helvetica "font" and leave it at that.
Okay, but what do you call Helvetica Black? A new font? A new
family? A new Typeface? You'll have to define those words for me
all over again. I knew what they meant, but apparently I'm out
of step with the times.

What about Bodoni Poster? Is that a family, a font, or a
typeface? If you bought a copy of Bodoni Poster, would you
expect to Get Bodoni Poster Bold, Bodoni Poster Italic, and
Bodoni Poster Bold Italic, too? (They don't exist yet.) Or would
you want to get Bodoni Plain, Bodoni Italic, Bodoni Bold, and
Bodoni Bold Italic? Apparently, if we do not want to mislead the
customer, we need a new word for fonts that don't have the Four
Variations. Perhaps simply a "semi-font"? "Font-ette?"

Until the NFNT format came along, these stylistic variations of
typefaces were listed as *separate items* under the "font" menu,
so there _is_ precedence in the Mac environment for considering
these fellows discreet fonts.

Adobe, please don't change your packaging. The dictionary still
says, "a complete assortment of type _in_one_size_and_style_" --
scalable font technology provides an infinite number of sizes
and thus makes the distinction of "size" meaningless, but
technology has *not* been able to take over the the creative
process required to make *true* style variations. (The real
purists among us might point out that one should adjust line
widths and such when fonts grow larger.)

Mark, I don't think you have any doubt in your mind, at this
point about what you are buying when Adobe says it bundles "13
fonts" with ATM. And hopefully, if we can keep terminology
straight, no one else will be confused, either.

I could see your point about "deception" if Adobe used the word
"font" inconsistently, but they don't. In fact, their larger ads
for ATM have a little picture of all the fonts that come with
the package, so there's no confusion. While you might not
agree with the way Adobe uses the word, they are (1) consistent,
and (2) right.

I suggest that if you want to use the Apple definition of "Font"
that you also use the Apple definition of "Style" -- which (in
the case of italics) is really skewed up.

-Bill Marriott