Fonts: What’s next?

Kathleen Tinkel

If you tend to take fonts and their ease of use for granted, you may not have noticed all the impulses to change that are bubbling just beneath the surface. We’ve had a nice decade of relatively easy times as far as using fonts is concerned, but the façade is cracking as the sturdy digital format is stretched across platforms, to the Web, and beyond.

I’ve just come back from Boston and the annual conference of ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale), the type industry’s 43-year-old trade association. Once a small, homogeneous group of typesetting equipment manufacturers, ATypI is now a diverse gaggle of font manufacturers and sellers, type designers both traditional and radical, graphic and Web designers, linguists, scholars, and software engineers, as well as OS developers Apple and Microsoft. ATypI conferences reflect the interests of its broadening base of members. It’s a great place to view the rapidly mutating world of typefaces and fonts – and get early warning of coming change.

Adobe gives up on Multiple Master fonts
Adobe announced that it is giving up on the Multiple Master technology it launched with hope and much fanfare in 1991. Our familiar standard Type 1 or TrueType fonts contain a single set of outlines of one weight, width, or style. Multiple Master technology puts two or more outlines in a font – a light and a bold, for example – and allows the user to create and use medium, semibold, or other styles in between. Adobe produced a couple dozen multiple master fonts, and promoted them through its Font & Function type catalog and, after it acquired Aldus, in Adobe Magazine. The promotions were at least somewhat successful: several Multiple Master fonts have appeared in Adobe’s ‘Top 25’ lists over the years. The newest Adobe Type Guide doesn’t include such a list, but its predecessor listed Myriad, Minion MM, Ex Ponto, Nueva, Caflisch Script, and ITC Garamond MM among the company’s bestsellers.

Still, it was evidently a hard sell and the format never developed a critical mass of users. Multiple Masters appealed to typographers, who liked being able to change the design slightly without deforming the letterforms as is inevitable with faux-bold or horizontal scaling. But many users complained about the weird font menu names, with sets of numbers instead of the more mnemonic designations normally used to describe fonts.

Adobe ships Multiple Masters with a collection of custom fonts. As a result, many users, already confused by the process of rolling their own, just accept the choices provided by Adobe rather than fiddle with the slider bars to create other styles.
I’ve also heard that some output services refuse to run jobs containing Multiple Master fonts (though they’d probably only notice if something went wrong, making that a classic self-fulfilling prophecy). Few outside of Adobe were able to create the complex format. I know of only a few – Ocean Sans MM from Monotype (which Adobe finished); and Veritas MM and perhaps one other by independent designer Brian Sooy; and there may be one or two additional MM fonts from third parties – but these are hardly enough to create a bustling market.

Surprisingly, the announcement aroused little or no comment at the ATypI conference. Perhaps Adobe is right when it says the format failed from lack of user interest.

Although Adobe will no longer develop new multiple master fonts, it will continue to sell multiple master fonts already in its library. It promises to support the technology indefinitely, and do provide an upgrade path for users when that support comes to an end one day.

Carol Twombly has retired
We also heard at ATypI that Adobe type designer Carol Twombly – designer of such classics as Lithos, Trajan, Charlemagne, and Adobe Caslon – has retired from type design in favor of the fiber arts. More sobering, she is not to be replaced for now, which leaves Rob Slimbach as the sole in-house type designer. Adobe is committing the type group’s efforts to production of OpenType fonts.

OpenType
And then there’s OpenType, the cross-platform (Mac and Windows), Unicode-compatible font format being developed by Adobe and Microsoft (though Microsoft will own the trademark and decide whether a font earns the right to be labeled OpenType). OpenType (OT) began as TrueType Open, Microsoft’s extension to the original TrueType format, but as OpenType the format encompasses two font flavors: ‘ttf,’ which is how TrueType fonts are designated in Windows; and ‘otf,’ for fonts that contain PostScript Type 1 outlines. Either type of OT font file will work on any computer, Mac or Windows. This will finally enable Windows users to supply fonts with application files sent to Mac-based output services for output. For Mac users, ‘otf’ OpenType ends the need for separate screen and printer files for Type 1 fonts.

The OpenType format addresses one of the serious limitations of current fonts – a limit of 256 characters per font. This is why we need ‘expert sets’ to get fractions, oldstyle figures, small caps, swash letters, and other characters in complex type families. An OT font with ‘Pro’ in its name can include thousands of characters. If you mix regular caps with small caps today, you usually need to manually kern wherever one font meets the other; in OpenType, the font can include kern pairs for these combinations. Of course, we must wait until applications give us a way to access all the characters in OT Pro fonts – only Adobe InDesign does so today.

In the beginning, most OT ‘otf’ fonts will be simply converted from Type 1s. By early next year Adobe will release a free OpenType converter that will convert existing Type 1 fonts to the ‘otf’ format – this won’t create Pro fonts with extended features, but will create single-file fonts that can be used on either platform.

After three years of hearing from co-developers Adobe and Microsoft that OpenType is nigh, it has actually begun to sidle into users’ hands. Tekton Pro.otf is bundled with Adobe’s new page layout application InDesign, and Adobe expects to ship other ‘pro’ OpenType fonts early next year, including Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion Pro, and Myriad Pro with new OS figures.
Now we can see if users care. Lack of enthusiasm killed the Mac’s extended QuickDraw GX font format a few years ago, and has at least contributed to Adobe’s decision to kill off its multiple master format. It would be easy to say that users don’t care about fonts that make it easier to accomplish fancy typography, but I think that would be a mistake. It really comes down to the cost–benefit ratio. Both multiple masters and GX had major drawbacks: Few applications supported GX fonts (and some key ones, like PageMaker, wouldn’t even run in their presence). And the format worked only on Macs, which is inconvenient for many users and the kiss of death for others, who must move editable documents back and forth across platforms. Multiple master fonts were hobbled by an odd, inconvenient, and, for some, incomprehensible interface.

It remains to be seen how smoothly OpenType fonts can be integrated into today’s workflows. A lot of third parties must be involved, as acceptance needs broad application support and, ideally, a common user interface – common across applications and platforms – for selecting from extended character sets. We need font companies to update their libraries to provide extended character sets and to sell the revamped fonts at upgrade prices that users can accept. Jobs composed in these fonts need to print readily on the range of imagesetter RIPs and desktop printers already in the marketplace. If we don’t get all that – or don’t get it quickly enough – OT Pro fonts are likely to fizzle.

Who dropped the ball?
According to announcements from Adobe, Adobe Type Manager (ATM) 4.5 and Adobe Type Reunion (ATR) 2.5 are incompatible with the forthcoming Mac OS 9, which is scheduled for release October 23. If these utilities are installed when you update OS 8.x to OS 9, the installer will move the Adobe files to an inactive folder; if you try to install them after installing OS 9, the system will crash when the ATM and/or ATR control panels load. This conflict arose late in the OS 9 development cycle when Apple engineers removed a bit of code needed by ATM, ATR, and some other software.

Fortunately, Adobe is updating both versions of ATM (Deluxe and regular or ‘light’) to 4.5.2 and ATR to 2.5.2, which will work with OS 9. The updates will be available for download from the Adobe Web site (ATM Light will be free to all; the others free to registered users). Adobe expects to post the updates by the time OS 9 is released.

What’s interesting is that OS 9 is the first version of the Mac OS in which ATM’s functions are built in, so you might expect that ATM wouldn’t be needed. It turns out that the built-in Type 1 rasterizer only works with applications that are compatible with Apple’s new Unicode-based font ATSUI-savvy applications – of which few have even been announced. For the uninitiated: ATSUI Is Apple’s new Unicode-based font imaging and printing software for the Mac. Unicode Is a catalog of the distinct characters (glyphs) used in virtually all of the earth’s languages with a unique name and number assigned to each glyph. Unicode can potentially end font ambiguity across platforms and among different languages and classes of alphabet.

Sad news from ITC
International Typeface Corporation (ITC) announced that it is being folded into parent company Esselte Letraset. The New York office will close by the end of the year, its employees laid off, and all operations moved to London, where Letraset has scarcely enough resources to keep itself afloat.
ITC was founded to make money, of course, but its contribution to the world of type has been considerable. ITC’s mission was to ensure that type designers got paid and that foundries could share designs without knocking them off. This was a great idea that paved the way for the democratization of type and typography and the dawn of desktop publishing. On the other hand, ITC also invented the exaggerated x-height and extra-tight fit of 1970s typography, which we still see today, and about which many typographers have mixed feelings.

ITC is also a genuine graphic arts/New York City institution, and moving it out of New York marks the end of an era that began with Herb Lubalin, Aaron Burns (both deceased), as well as Edward Rondthaler, Ed Benguiat, and others – the guys who launched Photo-Lettering, Inc., set the stage for today’s expressive advertising typography, and then went on to found ITC.

This announcement follows earlier news that the current issue of U&lc will be the last print issue of that venerable publication, now in its 26th year. ITC hopes to continue publishing U&lc Online, which was launched in November 1998 (www.itcfonts.com/itc/ulc/index.html).

TITLE!About ATypI
All that hard industry news was actually at the periphery of the ATypI conference. Information designer Edward Tufte gave the keynote, holding most of the 420 attendees in their chairs even though the presentation was largely generic (not particularly aimed at typographers). Among the speakers were Matthew Carter and David Berlow (who co-chaired this year’s meeting), graphic designer and Web guru Roger Black (on ‘type on the Web’), lettering artist John ‘Fud’ Benson (on carving type In stone for the Roosevelt memorial), Dutch type designer Gerard Unger (on W.A. Dwiggins), lettering artist and type designer Ed Benguiat (on influences on his lettering and type design), English stone carver, lettering artist and type designer Michael Harvey (on character in type design, leading into an introduction of his first text face Unico, to be released in January by the Dutch Type Library), German type designer Erik Spiekermann (on the work of Berthold’s Lange), type consultant Allan Haley (who moderated a panel on business), John Maeda of MIT (on multimedia type), and Hrant Papazian of UCLA (on reform of the Latin alphabet), and more.

We had an opportunity to view new work by David Carson, Chank Diesel, Plazm, Gerard Unger, Tobias Frere-Jones, Jonathan Hoefler. Novices could have their fledgling type designs critiqued by Matthew Carter, Jonathan Hoefler, and Rich Lipton. If we could fit it in, we could also attend a festival of short films, many of them collected by Adobe, about printing and type. Or we could attend continuous workshops for journeyman type designers led by David Berlow, Jonathan Hoefler, Michael Harvey, Jean-François Porchez, Lucas de Groot, Cyrus Highsmith, Laurence Penney, and Tom Rickner. The prize-winning entries in the 1999 TDC Typography competition and Typeface Design competition were shown, as well as the winners from Kyrillitsa ’99, an international type design competition held in Moscow.

And there was the third annual ATypI auction, with English type designer David Farey as organizer and auctioneer (it raised some $8,000 for the ATypI publication fund to pay for the annual journal Type, occasional newsletters, and other printed pieces). The contributions were fascinating – a complete collection of U&lc (well, all but two issues) and the mechanicals for the first issue of the magazine (which went begging and were withdrawn), cases of metal type, some wood type, glass photo fonts, a variety of Monotype spanners (wrenches needed for maintenance of typesetting equipment), a pottery vase made by Emigre’s Zuzana Licko, many posters, and many books. Two favorites were a 16th-century book beautifully set with ornamented caps, that went for $800; and a punch of a fleuron cut by the then-young Matthew Carter for Enschedé accompanied by a digital font of a suite of fleurons based on the punch design, which went for $250.

Next year ATypI plans to meet in Leipzig, Germany. You could attend the conference. You could even join ATypI (the dues are £62, about $100/ year). It’s a great way to keep an eye on the font industry.

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Graphic designer Kathleen Tinkel writes regularly about what the computer has done to design and typography.