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From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager
Message-ID: <1468@intercon.com>
Date: 22 Sep 89 15:36:11 GMT
References: <15514@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <110300005@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation
Lines: 39

In article <110300005@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>, mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
> Actually, I am surprised that laser printer users like Adobe's fonts.

In my opinion, they are the best available, although Bitstream's Fontware
comes close for non-PostScript printers (and ATM sounds like it'll even
fix that, if you're using a Mac).

> They are really not very good looking. Just look at Adobe's own
> Postscript manuals: their typefaces are so fat that they need a serious
> diet.

This is a matter of taste, not quality.  Adobe's PostScript typefaces are
very faithful renditions of the fonts.  The fact that you may not like
Times Roman or Stone Serif for body text is an issue of book design, not of
how "good" the fonts themselves are.

> And, at 300 d.p.i. they are really really bad. Their 
> outline technology is just too crude to work really well at less than
> 1200 d.p.i., and even there compromises apparently have been made.

Of course.  *Nothing* looks great at 300 dpi, and anything that is light
enough to use as a text face is going to look heavier on a laser printer
than on a typesetter.  Once again, though, this isn't a question of font
quality.

> 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 - all the fonts for a book I am writing take only
> 3 megabytes including resolutions of 1270 and 300 d.p.i. as well
> as screen sizes. 

This is a very traditional attitude.  I am skeptical, though.  Even Computer
Modern, which is often held up as the "right way", isn't hand-tuned any more
than Adobe's fonts are.  I'd be very interested in what actual fonts you
are using...

--
Amanda Walker
amanda@intercon.com