Where do fonts come from?

One of the first things Adobe did after aquiring Aldus and their map making app called Illustrator is decide these neat vector thingies were useless unless you could deploy them anywhere with the same quality. That was before the internet so quality output became their main and only focus. The first item on the agenda was vector quality printing. They needed a means of communicating with a printer the same way it did with the monitor as far as how to plot and draw the shapes. This required reinventing the printer more so than rewriting AI's code. The postscript language was born and Adobe had upgraded an entire industry for the second time since its release of photoshop. With the infrastucture already out there, fonts based in postscript was a no-brainer. This, like all new technologies only worked well with original adobe fonts.

Enter True Type fonts. Like all the ideas that resembled innovation on Microsofts part, this too suffered from poor implamentation on the way to the bank. Rather than adapt to it, microfluffy sought to buck the standard. This only reaked havoc on print servers everywhere as they would crash at the site of these gremlins. TT have come along way but are still to be viewed as the red-headed bastard step-cousin of postscript.

Both technologies have cleaned up their act since, so much so that about a year ago Adobe announced it would no longer support ATM Deluxe (no more upgrades). Life is much better today, with font managers like Suitcase and reputable foundrys like HOUSE you can do just about anything you want except use other OS's fonts..... or can you?

Just yesterday Adobe announced that they have along side Microsoft finished a new universal standard called 'opentype' and has converted it's latest release of the Font Folio over to this format.... Here we go again.

--jAQUAN

Adobe Converts Entire Type Library Into OpenType
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/16432.html?cprose=daily