1The Font WarsJames ShimadaDecember 6, 2006In 1984, two years after John Warnock and Chuck Geschke left Xerox PARC toform Adobe Corporation, the company introduced the PostScript page descrip-tion language. By the late 1980s desktop publishing was in full swing and Post-Script was a de facto standard in digital typography. While the PostScript lan-guage specification was open and anyone could license an interpreter to build aPostScript printer, Adobe held the secrets to the superior PostScript Type 1 fontformat, making Adobe the single source of licensing high-end fonts. While somecompanies were hard at work cracking the Type 1 format, Apple and Microsoftformed an alliance to create an alternative to PostScript technology. The result-ing product was TrueType, which was incorporated into both Mac OS System 7and Windows 3.1. The two competing font standards were responsible for intenserivalies, display incompatibilities, a proliferation of amateur fonts, and battles overthe loyalty of the design community. These events collectively became known asthe “Font Wars.”2Adobe PostScriptThe Adobe PostScript technology was at the core of the Font Wars. PostScript is apage description language that uses an interpreter to render the contents of aprinted page on a printing device or computer screen. It is also a full-fledged pro-gramming language that describes a printed document, including fonts and for-matting. All of the images on a printed page, including text, are specified by vec-tor graphics – mathematical formulas consisting of straight lines and spline curves.These formulas are then converted to the dots needed for digital output in a proc-ess called rasterizing. A PostScript interpreter is able to rasterize on the fly, whichallows for a great deal of flexibility in terms of scaling, rotating and other trans-formations suitable for the resolution of a particular output device. PostScript isalso device-independent, so it can be expected to run on a variety of printers andoutput devices without modification. When Postscript was first released, in an ef-fort to encourage support of the language, Adobe published the language specifi-cation and licensed the PostScript interpreter to printer manufacturers thatwanted to build PostScript output devices.The first Adobe Postscript manual was shipped to a potential customer inMarch 1984, but the seeds of a graphical description language had taken root inJohn Warnock’s mind several years earlier. In the early 1970s, Warnock workedfor the Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation, which sold powerful cus-tom graphics devices for real-time simulation, such as windshield graphics formaritime and flight training. Warnock led their Mountain View, California re-search office and was charged with developing a database system for their simula-tion machines. Because, for a real-time application, it was unfeasible to store agraphical representation of an environment as a series of bitmapped images,Evans and Sutherland employed a graphics model based on line segments andcoordinate system transformations. By 1975, Warnock and company had com-pleted the first version of the “Evans and Sutherland Design System,” a pro-gramming language used to control the graphics model.In 1978, Warnock joined Xerox PARC. At this time, Xerox was experi-menting with a series of raster printers: the XGP, EARS and Dover. After theheadaches of converting software from one printer to the next, it became clear tothe researchers at PARC that application programs generating files destined forthe printer should not be tied to the properties of a specific printer device. Thecompany began working on a device-independent page description scheme calledthe “Press” format. Warnock later merged Press with his work on graphics mod-eling languages into a full-featured page description language he called “Inter-press.” With Interpress, a printed page was described, not as a giant bitmap im-age, but rather in terms of line segments, curves, and transformations. Warnockand Chuck Geschke tried, unsuccessfully, for two years to convince Xerox tomake Interpress a commercial product. Xerox’s lack of support for Interpress en-couraged Geschke and Warnock to start their own company, which they namedAdobe, after a creek that ran past Warnock’s garden in Los Altos, California.(Cringley, 215)3PostScript was practically identical to Interpress, by comparison with otherpage description schemes available at the time, but it actually removed some fea-tures that Warnock had taken exception to during the development of Interpress.At PARC, a lot of work had gone into deliberately restricting Interpress in orderto maintain page independence. Page independence is an important considera-tion for performance, because it allows a printer to process a page before proc-essing all the preceding pages, making it possible to print page 457 in a 500-pagedocument without having to process pages 1 through 456. Much to the chagrin ofButler Lampson, the PARC researcher who contributed this feature of Interpress,Warnock removed it from PostScript. Warnock favored more flexibility in thePostScript language, making page independence impossible. Because the Post-Script language was dynamic, or “wild and free” as Lampson described it, a givenpage could not be printed until all the PostScript code on the previous pages hadbeen interpreted. Interestingly, Adobe’s PDF format – PostScript’s eventual suc-cessor – would later tout page independence as an improvement over PostScript.(Lampson)The handling of fonts is one of the major challenges with a language de-signed to describe the appearance of printed material. Like other graphical ob-jects in PostScript, fonts faces were defined in terms of lines and spline curves.Fonts represented in this manner are known as “outline fonts,” and they offer sig-nificant advantages over bitmapped or “raster” fonts, which are essentially repre-sented as a grid of pixels that are either on or off. One of the biggest advantagesof outline fonts is that only one outline per character is needed to produce all thesizes of that character that one would ever need, rather than requiring a differentand unique font for each size of the same typeface. Scaling a font allows it to beprinted in a variety of sizes on a variety of output devices. But Fonts cannot
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