Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!lethe!torsqnt!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!uwm.edu!uwvax!rang From: rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager Message-ID: Date: 22 Sep 89 15:15:15 GMT References: <15514@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <110300005@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu Organization: UW-Madison CS department Lines: 41 In-reply-to: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu's message of 21 Sep 89 13:10:00 GMT In article <110300005@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > >Basically, what Adobe is going to have to do to stay on top of >the business is to stop being so proprietary with their font formats: >otherwise they will fade away. And, according to the morning's >New York Times, they will do just that. I'd be really surprised if that happened. What percentage of the font market in the U.S. does Adobe have? I'm not sure, but it's awfully high--I've done proofreading for three summers at various places, and a good 80-90% of the fonts used are Adobe's. >Actually, I am surprised that laser printer users like Adobe's fonts. >They are really not very good looking. Really? Which of their 100+ fonts? I've found nobody yet who prefers, say, Bitstream fonts to Adobe's. These fonts have evolved over a long period of time--for some of them, hundreds of years--and been carefully hand-tuned. >The only way to get things REALLY right on a computer is to store the >bitmaps, hand adjusted, on a disk. That really doesn't take too >much space [ ... ] Depends how many fonts you're using. A 12-point font and kerning table (which should be stored separately for different sizes if you're hand-tuning the bitmap) runs about 1 MB at 1200 dpi. The font alone runs about 1/2 MB. Multiply this by, say, 4 style variations and 5 fonts...I don't have that much space to waste. Anton P.S. Take a look at some books and magazines sometime, and count how many of them use Adobe fonts. It's awfully high. +----------------------------------+------------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | | University of Wisconsin--Madison | | +----------------------------------+------------------+ "You are in a twisty little maze of Unix versions, all different."