Maybe the clients.

AS

Thomas Phinney gave a talk on this at TypeCon. Based on that, I'd say no. He'd probably be able to go into more detail about it.

is it really that difficult to create OT and PS? am i over-simplifying?

A cynical mind could say: "Hm, you can license the the fonts twice."

Maybe some old soft like quark need it since class based kerning is not accessible for them.

--astype.de--

I think it likely comes down to sales. If customers are buying Type 1 then you’d be silly not to provide them. OS and app support isn’t going to go away any time soon if ever.

Question for Adam - are there python scripts that make it easy to generate multiple Type 1 fonts from a given OT font for all the character-sets and expert sets you might need?

If not, then best advice for a new foundry would be to advertise OpenType and put a ‘PS Type 1 available on request’ notice on the site. There will be customers who’ll ask for them even if they don’t really need them (education opportunity). And there are customers who will genuinely need the Type 1’s (antiquated hardware etc.,)

Si

i hope you don't mind me moving this tread to the General Discussion area, i think this one deserves more coverage than what it might get if it's stuck in the Build section.

Well moved, Paul.

At a glance, it would appear that PS Type 1 is now dead in the water, BUT it's a chicken-and-egg situation; the OpenType format represents a far smaller range than what we're now used to, because the collection is still being added to ('standard' faces being coverted from the 'standard' format).

At the university where I work the current debate is about which format type library we purchase next year on a pretty sizable site license; as I understand it, if we spend, say $30K, we get an OpenType library that is less than a quarter of the size of the corresponding PS Type 1 library - and the PS Type 1 library would only cost a third as much again at around $40K.

In type education terms, we might not need all 32 instances of Adobe Warnock Pro OTF - but we really do need all the weights of the Univers family, so my colleagues are still keen on going with the established formats and libraries ('standard' faces in the 'standard' format).

In these terms PS Type 1 still represents good value for money. However, continued sales of PS Type 1 libraries may subsequently act as a disincentive to people or foundries developing OpenType fonts, and that may mean it's taking longer to become the next established standard.

I realize that there will always be PostScript fonts out there for whatever reason, but what is our role in the industry as font providers? Should we push the technology forward? Can we leverage the lagging software developers to catch up with the turning tide of font formats? Why should an increasingly neglected app drag us down? (Not to name names, but Extensis is dropping the ball, IMHO. I am an openly evangelistic InDesign advocate.)

What features does PS1 provide that make it worth using?

Si brings up the important notion of educating the consumer. I personally think that charging extra for multiple formats is a crock, and a disservice to the market at large. Andreas gave a wink to this issue as well.

Tiffany: It's no hair off my back to generate three or even four different formats of a typeface. Bless the magic of software. Sure, there are some things that you can do differently across the TTF/PS divide (hinting and point placement), but again... FontLab automates all of this. How many fontmakers take the time for this in the first place?

The real matter is that the entire computer industry is becoming more and more cross-platform friendly. HP iPods? Intel inside the next generation of Macs? OSX already supports "PC" formatted TTFs. I generate TTFs for my own use on my trusty old G4.

Why generate a platform-specific format in a cross-platform world?

(Whew... Paul... thanks for moving the thread. I think I open up more in the General Discussion Forum. heh)

Ben: Thanks for the real world scenario. It brings up some good points:

1.) Real Value -vs- Bang-For-Your-Buck Value

2.) VHS to DVD Analogy: Many old (crappy) flicks never saw the light of digital transfer. Will we see some contemporary (or slightly dated) fonts fall between the cracks, only to be revived through grassroots/cult/pirate actions?

As this whole issue is economic at the core, it will take a progressive (ie: altruistic) movement to redirect the economics. Not to make a call to arms, but I'd like to eradicate PS1 file clutter and orphaned font errors. (I still find straggling outline files in my OSX Fonts folders.)

I realize that there will always be PostScript fonts out there for whatever reason
Not if current software doesn't support them.

I personally think that charging extra for multiple formats is a crock, and a disservice to the market at large.
i think the way we do things here at P22 is pretty fair: We include the equivalent PS/TT fonts with our OT packages. So you should get all the same glyph options, except we don't do CE PS or TT fonts, so there you only get one option. But i'm sure if a user needed CE versions of PS fonts, we would do that service for them.

I myself am not sorry to see PostScript fonts go the way of the world. Just as you are a proponent of InDesign, i am of OpenType. I wish there were some way to make the transition easier on type users/consumers. I think this would be easier if the software support was in place. Just today I was dealing with a customer who couldn't get OT fonts to list correctly in Word for Mac. Hopefully these types of problems will be alleviated in the near future...

Paul: P22 may be making the first step into a reasonable retail market, but why not provide TTFs with your PS1s, and vice versa? At least make them available?

There are handy utilities for sale out there that do a reasonable job of converting between formats. Why leave it to third parties to potentially muck up a font file with an automated, unauthorized process? Why create the market for these third parties? Why not educate the user and keep them close to your heart (and merchant account) with a nice, cozy hug... a cross-platform hug?

The majority of font users know what's up. I'm talking about the design community. (What design school grad hasn't made a font these days?) The majority of users know how to piddle with Fontographer. The rest have a third party font converter. They are also the ones that will take their commission expenses elsewhere when you're not on the level.

It's one thing to fleece the unwitting for another 50% of the font price (such is business), but it's clearly another to perpetuate an outmoded practice and thereby stagnate the technology and our industry. I'm not making qualifications, but if we're treating everyone like luddites, the informed will maintain their disdain for what amounts to price gouging. Again, I think I'm echoing Andreas's 'cynical' consideration.

(...and Paul, none of this is directed at you or P22 in particular, save for the initial question. At T26, I was just as inhibited by manhours and fiscal demands to make such a giant leap into formats and revised marketing... even through a ground-up site redesign. Timing is perhaps everything?)

I hope Phinney steps in soon to share what I missed at TypeCon...

P22 may be making the first step into a reasonable retail market, but why not provide TTFs with your PS1s, and vice versa?
we do that as well.

Regardless of platform?

regardless. so for example, say you order Artscript Pro, for either platform you get 1 OT font, 2 TT fonts and 2 PS fonts.

I'm talking about packaging both PC and Mac font files in the same license. P22 charges the 50% Cross-Platform fee... http://www.p22.com/products/crossplat.html

It's one thing to charge more for a deluxe, 'Pro' opentype font, as it inherently contains more goodies. To charge extra for a file that will work on the secondary platform is quickly losing relevancy. Are there any distributors/foundries that are working to abolish this policy?

How often do folks purchase the Cross-Platform License? After the T26 site redesign, sales reports showed that people actually would make the dual platform purchase, however infrequently. How often do users actually call P22 to extend their license? Likewise, I wonder how often they just convert the fonts themselves in breach of the P22 EULA.

Back on topic... Who wants/needs to use PostScript fonts anymore?

Si writes: OS and app support isn’t going to go away any time soon if ever.

Microsoft's own Avalon graphics engines in Windows Vista does not include a Type 1 rasteriser. This means that apps written specifically for Avalon will not support Type 1 fonts. Apps that still use the older GDI engine will continue to support Type 1 fonts. That, at least, is my understanding of the current state of play.

At Tiro, we now have a policy of not making Type 1 fonts even if clients request them, and have turned down work on this basis. The main reason for this is the lack of QA tools for testing Type 1 fonts, and I don't like to ship software that I can't see inside. Compare the validation, comparison and testing tools for TT and CFF OpenType freely available from Microsoft and Adobe, and font table editing tools like TTX, to the kind of blindness in which we had to work on Type 1 fonts, just trusting that tools like Fontographer and FontLab were getting everything right. We wasted too many hours of our lives trying to simply identify bugs in Type 1 fonts, let alone trying to fix them.

The last time we shipped Type 1 fonts, one key output device in our client's print production workflow substituted incorrect characters, despite all other proofing devices handling the font correctly. How do you fix a problem like that? How can you assure the client that the font is made to spec when there are no validation tools to ensure conformance? Learning to interpret raw PS code didn't seem like a good use of a type designer's time.

Type 1 fonts? I spit on this arsewipe, ill-documented format. Good riddance.

Okay, so the last line is a bit over the top. I was wondering what obscenity I could sneak pass the Typophile autocensor. ;)

> I was wondering what obscenity I could sneak pass the Typophile autocensor.

Anything British/Canadian actually. And also sophisticated obscenities. David, Vince and I did a few tests in an old thread about the Typophile autocensor thingie, and it works fine. :^)

Now this is funny -- I'm trying to find some obscenity to finish off my post and I can't think of any, for the one felching time I really need it! Bugger me senseless, I can be such a twat! Bollocks!

The initial question:
> Can anyone offer any reason to release fonts in Type1 format anymore?

At this point, only for clients still using old software, which is surprisingly high. Amazingly, we still get calls from people (some from well known, to remain unamed, publications) that are running Quark 4 on OS 8.6. Yikes. This is the last quarter of 2005! It's hard to fathom but my best guess is that old habits, budgets, tradition and deadlines have combined to allow this situation.

And to add to the testing portion of John's post...
We have yet to experience a customer problem with any of our OT fonts. Once thoroughly
tested and generated, an OT font file is pretty bullet proof. If I had my way, I would delete
all of the T1 files from my machine and only offer OT. Still waiting on that one...

And one more thing... I was pleasantly surprised by the updated version of Bringhurst (v3.0) and page 180. In describing the evolution from 7 bit, 8 bit and finally 32 he adds:
"The extended ASCII character set is the alphabet not of the real world nor of the UN General Assembly but of NATO: a technological memento of the them-and-us mentality that thrived in the cold war".

> It’s hard to fathom but my best guess is that old habits, budgets, tradition and deadlines have combined to allow this situation.

I notice time and again that creative people can be uncharacteristically conservative in their working methods. I mean, creativity is supposed to be all about change and adapting, isn't it? What's so hard about learning a couple of new shortcuts?

Yes, yes... the pressures of budgets and deadlines. I've spoken with a handful of sad, almost embarrassed people working for the big houses regarding their desire to make the InDesign switch. Quark has such deep roots in the daily workflow of these places.

For a while it was also the service bureaus playing dead. I've seen a few leap into InDesign. But they're in a different position... they need to meet the client's needs. When enough of their clients are delivering PDFs or InDesign packages, they have to shift to meet the demand.

Quark 7 is supposed to support Unicode and advanced OTF features. Ascender Corp here in Chicagoland is helping out with that. I wonder what the status is...

EoTS V.3! Thus, my Christmas list begins.

John, why not provide T1 fonts but with an explicit no-support warning?
It seems unfair to shun the format for people who are stuck with it.

hhp

>Microsoft’s own Avalon graphics engines in Windows Vista does not include a Type 1 rasteriser.

John, thanks for correcting me. This is true. Although Windows Vista includes the PS raterizer and offers exactly the same Type 1 support as Windows XP, the next generation development platform, Avalon, is a total re-write and does not support Type 1 currently and we have no plans to add support for it. So new apps developed for Avalon won't support Type 1. Office 12 for example does not use Avalon, so will continue to support Type 1 fonts.

Cheers, Si

I admit that the difference between the Quark and Adobe environments goes beyond a few keystrokes or shortcuts. (Part of my disdain for Quark when everything apart from page layout is done in Illustrator/Photoshop.) It's more akin to writing with your left or right hand... if you're not a trained ambidextrian.

Regardless, and back on topic... doesn't Quark provide basic OTF support all the way back to v4 anyway?

OpenType fonts will work with current and older versions of Quark, but with some limitations.

You only get the first 200 or so characters--equivalent to MacRoman or Windows Latin-1, so they will seem just like plain old PostScript Type 1 or TrueType fonts.

You also get no OpenType feature support (ligatures, alternate figures, small caps, etc.).

Kerning will mostly work, but there may be combinations left out. OT fonts usually use class-based kerning. In order for kerning to work in, say, Quark 6, the OS has to create a table of kerning pairs derived from the class-based kerning. There is a limit to how big such a table can be. Class-based kerning can be the equivalent of thousands or even tens of thousands of kerning pairs, much higher than the limit in many cases. So a subset is used.

In most other respects, OT fonts behave the same as older font formats in Quark.

I bought Adobe's original version of Adobe Garamond OTF when it came out. I had quirky results with Quark 4.1 and gave up on the font at first. Later, when Adobe improved InDesign enough I dumped Quark (good riddance). Of course Adobe then bundled its Garamond free with InD so I was out the original cost and had a font which I never was able to use. The new super-duper All-Pro version of Garamond is a fine piece of work and comes with CS2 if you choose it. The only problems I have with OTF fonts now is with Microsoft products. That is probably because most word processing users are not as picky about type as I am. I understand Microsoft (as usual) is fixing all this in their next rev. I must add that I am using a Mac so whatever Avalon brings won't be of interest to me unless they port the improvements to Mac OS-X as well.

ChrisL

That's funny. I haven't been on Typophile much this week because I've been busy at work. Among other things, creating content for my blog. And one of the first articles is on exactly this topic.

See http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography

Meanwhile, Ben wrote something above that confused me:

"At the university where I work the current debate is about which format type library we purchase next year on a pretty sizable site license; as I understand it, if we spend, say $30K, we get an OpenType library that is less than a quarter of the size of the corresponding PS Type 1 library - and the PS Type 1 library would only cost a third as much again at around $40K."

If you're talking Adobe's Font Folio, then the OpenType version has every font that the last Type 1 version has, and then some. The difference is that in conversion, some fonts have been merged. Thus the OpenType version has a lower apparent "font count." But you're not missing anything that you had in Type 1. (There were about 30 fonts we didn't have the rights to convert, and those are still present in Type 1 format.)

Now, the one caveat is that if you are using old-fashioned software like QuarkXPress (prior to version 7) or Word, then you won't be able to access the extended typographic goodies in the new OpenType fonts, so functionally you can get at less stuff. But if you are using, say, our Creative Suite applications, the new OpenType fonts are far more functional than the old Type 1.

Cheers,

T

Nice! Thanks for the inside scoop, Thomas. The blog is looking chock full of goodness already... keep it coming!

So, it's not so much a "Goodbye, PostScript Type 1" as it is a "Hey! Type 1! How ya been, ol' timer? We should do some conversions sometime. Have your people call me."

Phinneous T. Bluster is right on time! Thanks Thomas:-)

ChrisL

John, why not provide T1 fonts but with an explicit no-support warning? It seems unfair to shun the format for people who are stuck with it.

Who is stuck with it? Some people have workflows that include software with 8-bit text encoding limitations, but almost all such software provides codepage support so can access more than 256 characters from a large font. I don't want to encourage 8-bit hack encodings for typographic features, e.g. the Adobe 'expert set' encoding, but even if this is what the user wants this is an encoding issue not a format issue. Even if a user is truly limited to 8-bit fonts, this still doesn't imply a limitation to the Type 1 font format. I would happily ship TrueType or CFF fonts with specific 8-bit character set support if a client really needed them.

Are there applications in current use* -- or perhaps output devices? -- that specifically require the Type 1 font format? There may be, but I can't think of any offhand.

* By this I mean both that they are being used and that there are good reasons why a later version of the software cannot be used, e.g. because it doesn't exist or because of compatibility with some other aspect of the workflow.

Interestingly, over lunch I read the latest MacWorld about the Intel chip and beyond, and how it is possible that control over our own computers could be taken away from us. Geez, no shit, isn't that what all this is all about? and has been for some time. And, the harder it is made to actually make type, hey... Back to the pre-digital days.

Gerald

Gerald, if all you want is the same level of functionality provided by a Type 1 font, it is no more difficult to make an OpenType font than it ever was to make a Type 1 font. Actually, it is easier in some respects, and you only need to make one binary font file, not multiple files for each operating system, which I always found one of the most annoying aspects of the Type 1 format.

"...and how it is possible that control over our own computers could be taken away from us."

What is this, some Orwellian paranoia?

Silas

More like the futuristic society in Well's The Time Machine. Apparently has something to do with the Intel chip that will implement "trusted computing."

Just a further extension of the seamless integration of today's plug and play computing.

Gerald

See http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography

Speaking of which, there's a problem with the nameplate (at least on Safari and Firefox on my Macs). The subtitle "Thomas "my other car is a sans serif" Phinney is Adobe's Program Manager for Fonts & Core" is fine, but the rest gets cut off by the white main text background.

In Win IE there's no clipping but the spacing is tight. Tom's blog doesn't seem to match the style of the other Adobe blogs, eg.

http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2005/10/index.html

But that's not such a bad thing. And his content is a cut above the others too.

Si

The header/nameplate seems to look different in all my browser. Maybe the best thing would be to make it into a graphic... I'm sure Thomas has Photoshop. =)

Great content, I'll be a regular reader for sure.

so.....the bottom line: bye bye PS & TT?

>the bottom line: bye bye PS & TT?

Where did you get this? OpenType is TrueType.

Si

I know. Let's put that way: bye bye PS & TT with 256 characters and cross platform font compatibility problems?

TT has always supported 64K glyphs
Win TT have been installable on Mac OS since OS9?

Win TT have been installable on Mac OS since OS9?

Nope.

With ATM version 4.6.2?

Hmmm... I dont' know about 4.6.2. Where's Phinney?

London for St Bride conference - anyone else there? How's it going?