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From: gelphman@adobe.COM (David Gelphman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Royal vs Adobe
Message-ID: <2220@adobe.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 90 21:44:56 GMT
References: <1516@mountn.dec.com> <1990Apr10.154031.10203@intercon.com>
Reply-To: gelphman@adobe.UUCP (David Gelphman)
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
Lines: 41

In article <1990Apr10.154031.10203@intercon.com> amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes:
>There are only two fundamental technical differences between TrueType and
>Adobe's Type 1, as I see things:
>
>1. TrueType fonts can contain information in addition to character glyph
>   descriptions, such as ductility, contextual forms, kerning, and ligatures.
>   This is mainly of use to the as-yet-nonexistent Line Layout Manager, but
>   will become more important as time goes on, especially with non-Roman
>   writing systems.  In my view, this is TrueType's biggest win.

    I consider this type of information to be metric information,
not information necessary for rendering the characters themselves. Adobe
has always supplied metric information beyond that necessary for rendering
the characters, but has kept that information separate from the character
descriptions themselves. On the Macintosh, that data is in the FOND resource.
Our general distribution format is the Adobe Font Metric file (AFM) which
is a human readable, machine parsable format. AFM files contain character
metrics, family level font metric data, kerning pairs, and more. There is
nothing which precludes addition of more metric information to that data
although clearly it isn't very significant until some applications or system
software take advantage of it.
    I'm curious about another point. Adobe has generally made screen bitmap
font representations of our fonts available at low cost. Indeed, the
whole font library of screen fonts only is available for something like
$100 I believe. These screen fonts are also available for downloading from
CompuServe in the Adobe forum. One advantage to separating the screen bitmap
and font metric data from the outline data is that users have been able to
use the fonts and format their documents with these faces without purchasing 
the outline fonts. This has enabled a new industry, namely people take their
formatted documents to their local copy shop and print their documents on
a laser printer or (better still) a typesetter.
   I realize that having separate files for the same font (the Font/DA
mover suitcase file and the PostScript language outline font data file)
is potentially confusing and slightly less elegant than one file but
it does provide this advantage. Do others find this useful?

David Gelphman
Adobe Systems Incorporated

The comments here are my own and do not necessarily correspond to the
views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.