Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!huxley!glenn From: glenn@huxley.huxley.bitstream.com (Glenn P. Parker) Newsgroups: comp.fonts Subject: Re: Italics and descenders - a query to font archeologists Message-ID: Date: 26 Oct 90 22:11:23 GMT References: <655@riegel.prosys.se> Sender: glenn@huxley.UUCP Reply-To: (Glenn Parker) Distribution: comp Organization: Bitstream, Inc. Lines: 19 In-reply-to: ath@prosys.se's message of 26 Oct 90 07:17:35 GMT > So, why are so few new type faces 'old' - why don't the latest type > faces on the market use narrow italics and full descenders? > > Only inertia? Or are there other reasons? There are plenty of Bitstream fonts that might be classified as "old" in the sense you describe, but they often get mangled by the people that use them. Probably the most common problem is that the fonts conform to restrictions in an unsophisticated preview medium, e.g. Microsoft Windows, which don't allow characters to overlap or exceed a fixed bounding box. Also, many font encoding systems don't know what to do with "alternate" characters that offer the user a set of expressive variations on a single character. Instead, people just pick the standard (most boring) version of each character and throw the rest away. I'm not even going to consider the artificially obliqued fonts the Macintosh provides. -- Glenn P. Parker glenn@bitstream.com Bitstream, Inc. uunet!huxley!glenn 215 First Street BIX: parker Cambridge, MA 02142-1270