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From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Royal vs Adobe
Message-ID: <1990Apr10.213900.10836@intercon.com>
Date: 10 Apr 90 21:39:00 GMT
References: <27618215MES@MSU) <18000049@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <5363@mnetor.UUCP> <11255@wpi.wpi.edu> <5366@mnetor.UUCP> <11320@wpi.wpi.edu>
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Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Herndon, VA
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In article <11320@wpi.wpi.edu>, macman@wpi.wpi.edu (Chris Silverberg) writes:
> We've got a situation where Apple improves their
> system architechture so we can drop Royal fonts, which is a better and
> probably more affordable font system, and existing Adobe fonts, all into
> the system folder.

Actually, I think someone's been leading you up the garden path a bit, there.
The System 7.0 font manager, while supporting TrueType (nee Royal) fonts,
does not change the treatment of Adobe fonts one whit.  They're still only
there for the printer driver, as far as Apple is concerned.  A font
(including an Apple outline font) can map to a particular PostScript font
through the FOND resource just like it can now, but that's it.  A System
7.0-compatible version of ATM will be necessary to use Adobe fonts on the
screen or with non-PostScript printers.

Of course, there's nothing against supplying *both* TrueType and Adobe
versions of the same typeface--I suspect that an Apple "Times Roman" clone
will map to Adobe "Times-Roman" as far as the LaserWriter driver is
concerned, even though there are two completely separate sets of outlines
in two separate formats.

For at least a while, I think it will be the available base of fonts that
will make the difference, and Adobe has an unfashionably big head start :-).

And after looking hard at both formats (Adobe's recent book and Apple's
preliminary docs from last year's Dev. Conf.), I have to say that as flexible
as Apple's format is, I like Adobe's rasterizer better from the point of
view of trying to write fonts for it.

What would be really, truly cool would be to use Adobe's glyph descriptions
with Apple's new meta-glyph (is that a word? it is now...) information.
Unfortunately, by all reports the Line Layout Manager will not make it into
the first round of System 7, making the point moot for a while.  Without the
LLM, TrueType won't be of any more practical use than ATM is right now.

--
Amanda Walker, InterCon Systems Corporation
--
"Y'know, you can't have, like, a light, without a dark to stick it in...
 You know what I'm sayin'?"     --Arlo Guthrie