BOB SCHAFFEL AND Chuck Weger's "Font Fatigue" (January '96, page 111) is an indictment of Adobe PostScript fonts and the printing industry's false belief in their superiority. That a company can fail to fix such problems for ten years and still succeed against superior technology is a mystery to me.
As digital-font experts know, TrueType is a "smarter" font technology. TrueType fonts unify screen and printer versions in a single file and feature better hinting. TrueType fonts use quadratics (4 points), whereas PostScript employs Bezier curves (3 points). TrueType has also greatly reduced Adobe's unbelievably high font prices... remember paying $100 to $200 per font?
Surely it is the uninformed clinging to the false superiority of PostScript fonts -- and the need to justify the expense of costly PostScript imagesetters -- that is the actual problem here.
Robert Maxwell Case
robertmc@youniverse.com
BOB AND CHUCK confirm that the PostScript-font realm suffers from very serious shortcomings, but all they can do is offer some cheap and dirty work-arounds. They fail to suggest a possible avenue for resolving the problems once and for all.
I have no idea why the media is always so soft on Adobe, but I am convinced that there will be no solutions to PostScript gotchas until Adobe feels some heat from the media, from a sizable percentage of its customer base, or from competition that threatens its current monopoly in the desktop-publishing industry.
I have tried and failed to get my message through to Adobe. You haven't even tried.
Jim Whitlow
gem@letter.com
/ We don't consider ourselves as clinging to "false superiority" -- we're just conscious of the fact that nearly every RIP and every design shop and every prepress and printing facility in the known universe has standardized on PostScript as the font technology. In fact, almost every desktop-published page that is destined for quality printing relies on PostScript for high resolution. That situation is not going to change just because TrueType may be superior in some areas -- otherwise, we would all be using Beta VCRs instead of VHS.
Market economics dictates much of what becomes standard, and the installed base of high-resolution PostScript devices does not bode well for what would effectively have to be an industrywide change in technological direction. TrueType, however, certainly has helped bring font prices down. And although it's a nice idea, we're not sure that complaining to Adobe will solve current font problems, since the responsibility goes deeper than simply Adobe's software (Apple is equally guilty, we think).
