never put much effort into making its PDF export function work well--
possibly because Microsoft would rather people use the Word doc format
rather than a portable format.
in which Microsoft and Apple faced off against the father of desktop publishing,
Adobe Systems. As everyone knows, a digital font is a mini-program that enables a
system to display and print text with a typeface (such as Palatino) set to a particular
size (such as Palatino 12). While Adobe didn't exactly invent this concept, the
company did invent PostScript and a font format that works with PostScript (the
Type 1 format). The combination enabled computers to print with high-quality
typefaces on different laser printers and with better quality using the same font on
high-resolution imagesetters. This combination revolutionized high-quality printing in
the late 1980s, and most of today's printers use PostScript.
challenge Adobe's dominance. They did it to try to force Adobe into opening its
proprietary Type 1 format. However, typographers weren't crazy about TrueType's
quality. But even typographers have to eat, so these two formats now dominate
computing with an uneasy truce. Both formats work with Windows, Macintosh,
Linux, and Unix systems.
OpenType, that slapped TrueType and Type 1 together. "That was 1996," wrote
Clark Kim in Magazine World in 2002. "OpenType today is as popular as the U.S.
Olympic hockey team in Canada."
control. While Microsoft and Adobe support it, the gaggle of small type foundries
around the world are not yet on board. The transition to OpenType hasn't been
easy. It is technically challenging to do OpenType fonts, and they've already got
their hands full with Type 1 and TrueType.
other software, other fonts are added to Windows like new genes to the gene pool,
and those fonts automatically become available to Word. As we all merrily computed
our way into the 21st century, our systems sprouted different fonts from all these
different installations. When you create a document on one system, using its fonts,
and then transfer that document to a different system, different fonts are substituted,
with unpredictable results.
Type 1 or TrueType formats), your system and printer can get as bewildered as you
must be at this point.
.on.ca/magworld2002/talkingtech/font.html.