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From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: TrueType vs PostScript
Message-ID: <26B61E90.4D50@intercon.com>
Date: 1 Aug 90 00:13:03 GMT
References: <9007311914.AA01458@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: usenet@intercon.com (USENET The Magnificent)
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Herndon, VA
Lines: 33

I've read and studied both the TrueType preliminary docs and the Adobe Black
Book.  There are a several ways to look at the two formats, but there are
two viewpoints that I find personally relevant: a type designer and a
programmer who might want to write a rasterizer.  Put simply:

 - Type Designer

	Adobe wins hands down.  I design the glyphs, describe the
	alignments zones for the font and stem hints for the characters,
	and the printer deals with making it look good.  Experience shows
	that it does quite a good job of it, too.

 - Programmer

	I'd rather implement a TrueType interpreter.  It's up to the
	font designer to work out the mechanics of hinting and grid-fitting;
	I just have to scan-convert lines and quadratic splines.  Since
	much of the hinting is "precomputed," my rasterizer is much simpler,
	and I can probably squeeze some extra performance out of a slow
	processor.

Now, in the long term, I suspect there will be more people building fonts
than there will be building rasterizers. For this reason if nothing else,
I think the Adobe Type 1 format is still quite healthy.  TrueType will also
survive (at least for quite a while), thanks to its being included with
every Macintosh once System 7.0 is out, and with Windows once Microsoft
decides to implement it on an 80x86 processor.

As long as my computer can handle both, I'll be happy...

--
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation