Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!lethe!torsqnt!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!adobe!bezanson From: bezanson@adobe.COM (Brian Bezanson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Adobe Type Manager Message-ID: <1237@adobe.UUCP> Date: 22 Sep 89 19:04:16 GMT References: <15514@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <110300005@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: bezanson@adobe.UUCP (Brian Bezanson) Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View Lines: 61 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. Your comment surpises me. Adobe's fonts are the largest sellers and highest rated by the top typeographers in the world. >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. It seems that you may have Adobe and some other type manufacturer reversed. Everybody has wanted the Adobe hinting technology that makes our fonts look consistant across various resolutions. BitStream's fonts are only advertised for >1200 dpi because they lack these hints. One of the recent issues of Publish something magazine compared hinted and non-hinted fonts and let the eyes be the judge - guess which looked better. And our outline technology is the same outline technology everyone uses - Bezier curves. The hinting is added to improve the look at lower resolution. >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. >And I have fine tuned out a few crudities in the 300 and 1270 d.p.i. >sizes. (Personal Mini-Flame On) This 'flame' of yours on Adobe seems like you don't know what you're talking about. Bitmaps are used (assuming PostScript fonts here since that is what you're complaining about) for screen layout. Hand tuned Bitmaps are the best way to get accurate screen placement. But a 72 dpi (Screen resolution) Times bitmap at 72 point takes up 105K of space. If you want 10,12,14,18,24,36, 48,60, & 72 point bitmaps then you'll have a 300+K set of bitmaps for just one face. If you add bold, italic, bold-italic - then were at 1200K. Now lets add that for a books you'll use a serif font for body text, a sans-serif for titles, page numbers, and a third Titling font for other effects. This comes to 3600K w/o the PostScript outlines (12 faces x 30K = 360K). With ATM you need the outlines (360K) plus 10,12 bitmaps for 12 faces (using above example - 12K per face) for a grand total of 474K - and you get near hand- tuned quality at any size. Remember, all of my bitmap calculations are for a 72 dpi bitmap. If you really used bitmaps for 300 and 1270 dpi then you'd need ~4X and 18X bitmaps (a "tad" over 3 megs). From your talk above it doesn't sound like you're using PostScript Type 1 fonts. The only PostScript fonts you can edit are Type 3, but you're saying you have one outline for 300 dpi and another for 1270. The whole idea behind PostScript is device independance - resolution doesn't matter because they are all mathematical calculations. (Personal Mini-Flame Off) Some last second questions: What fonts are you having problems with? What fonts don't you like? What/whose printer are you printing too? -- ---- Brian Bezanson bezanson@adobe.com Adobe Systems Incorporated The opinions expressed above are my own and may not represent those of Adobe.