Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!intercon!news
From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Royal Fonts vs. ATM
Message-ID: <1705@intercon.com>
Date: 10 Jan 90 01:14:14 GMT
References: <844@sahiways.gov.au> <8400217@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Lines: 57

In article <8400217@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> Are you on Adobe's payroll?

Well, I'm not, although it has some appeal, I admit :-).

> You've got it backwards.  Royal exists because of ADOBE's
> pig-headedness.  Apple wanted to enhance fonts on the Mac.  Adobe
> would not release their font-hints methods.  So Apple was forced to do
> its own outline font technology to enhance the macintosh.

Well, that's what the trade rags have been saying, and it makes a nice
simple story.  I don't think it is quite so cut and dried, though.  Many
of the features of Royal simply aren't part of an Adobe font, and many of
them are necessary for other efforts that Apple is aiming at--non-Roman
fonts in particular.  There are some (hopefully) non-political things that
you might want to consider as reasons that Apple might not be satisfied
with Adobe fonts.  Among them are:

 - Inablitity to easily handle more than 256 glyphs per instantiation of
   a font.  This is a problem for Oriental writing systems in particular.

 - Writing systems such as Arabic which use glyph deformation instead of
   spacing for justification.

 - Information about ligatures, kerning, nonlinear scaling, and contextual
   forms.

 - Speed.  The quadratic splines that Royal uses, while they may use more
   control points to describe a curve, are faster to compute (fewer
   instructions in the inner loop of a scan converter based on forward
   differences, for example).  Since Apple wants things to run on as slow
   a machine as possible (a Macintosh Plus or SE), this is pretty critical.
   ATM produces pretty fonts, but it's also pretty slow, even on a Mac II.

And a political one that has little to do with Adobe:

 - Apple has a severe NIH problem.  There seems to be a corporate policy of
   not being willing to pay license fees or royalties to anyone else.
   Sometimes this is good.  Sometimes this is bad.  I'd say the jury's still
   out on which category Royal will fall into.

> This forced Adobe to release the hints, and ATM is Adobe's last-ditch
> effort to avoid getting creamed by their earlier pig-headedness.

Adobe has a few warts, just like any company in the industry, but ATM is
not direct competition for Royal fonts.  Royal will be built in to System
7, but it is useless with Adobe fonts.  ATM bridges the gap, keeping the
fonts that people have already bought from becoming obsolete.  Not too bad
for an INIT.  Apple has the hard task: writing a LaserWriter driver that
will translate Royal fonts into PostScript.  They could always just draw
all of the glyphs explicitly, but that would be real slow, since they
wouldn't get put into the font cache...

Amanda Walker
Speaker To PostScript
InterCon Systems Corporation
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