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From: norman@d.cs.okstate.edu (Norman Graham)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript,comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Font Pricing
Message-ID: <1990Sep10.043539.26@d.cs.okstate.edu>
Date: 10 Sep 90 04:35:39 GMT
References: <1990Sep08.111132.10740@ddsw1.MCS.COM>
Organization: Oklahoma State University
Lines: 55

From article <1990Sep08.111132.10740@ddsw1.MCS.COM>, by hammen@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Robert Hammen):
> [...] The key question will be "how
> good are the TrueType fonts compared to their Type 1 equivalents?" The main
> issue will be hinting, which is done in the PS interpreter (in the case of
> the Type 1 fonts) and is done in the font (in the case of TrueType). The
> TrueType hinting language is thorough but complex. One font vendor (who does 
> not want to be identified) said that it might take twice as long to produce
> superhinted TrueType fonts than to produce their Type 1 equivalents, and,
> were that the case, he'd be inclined to charge twice as much for them. The
> Altsys folks claim that their automatic TrueType font hinting will be at
> least as good as Type 1. I guess we'll see...

It seems that most people are choosing to overlook what I consider to
be TrueType's biggest advantages over Type 1: 
  - optical bounds for automatic optical alignment of characters and
    for hanging punctuation,
  - support for variant glyphs such as swash characters, small capitals,
    and old-style numerals,
  - ductility (the ability to stretch only part of a character) for 
    cursive letters or mathematical symbols (i.e. stretching the straight
    parts of the '{' character but leaving the curved parts alone), 
  - anchor points for the application of applied marks,
  - an upper limit of 65000 glyphs per font,
  - a hinting mechanism that allows character shapes to vary at different
    sizes (Yea, no more titling capitals. BTW, for those who don't know,
    many type designers intensionally vary the shapes of characters as 
    they grow in size. This prevents the bolding effect that titling caps
    of digital typefaces are intended to correct.)
  - specification of info that will allow the line layout manager to 
    provide automatic ligaturing, etc. (actually, applications could
    use this info before the LLM becomes available, but I expect most
    people will wait.)
  - a lot of support for non-roman scripts like Arabic, Hindi, Japanese.
    I expect Type 1 will have to change a great deal to really do this
    well.

The way I look at it, one TrueType typeface can contain the equivalent
of Adobe Garamond, Adobe Garamond Expert, Adobe Garamond Alternate, and
Adobe Garamond Titling Capitals. And when the LLM comes out, I get extra
functionality that will probably be missing from Type 1 faces.

Yes, a 'superhinted' TrueType font will take a lot of work--but I expect
it to be well worth it.

> The conclusion from the above: it will probably take at least as much 
> effort, if not more, to produce a TrueType font than to produce its Type 1
> equivalent. Therefore, if the TrueType fonts cost less to the user, it will
> be for marketing reasons rather than technical reasons.

Agreed.
-- 
Norman Graham                            Oklahoma State University
  Internet:  norman@a.cs.okstate.edu     Computing and Information Sciences
  BangPath:                              219 Mathematical Sciences Building
     {cbosgd,rutgers}!okstate!norman     Stillwater, OK  USA  74078-0599