Re: Windows at 30

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

Hang on, Kari: clear fonts are not screen candy but absolutely functional
elements. You emphasize, below, good printing every time. And that is
emphatically true. But for anyone who wanted to have the best possible
screen experience (including those who wanted to save paper), TT fonts
were the only way to go, so much so that all the scalable fonts used by
Apple on screen were (and still are, as on Windows) TT fonts. Also, the
TT equivalent of Multiple Masters, was developed by and for Apple. That
said, TT does require more CPU power, and I am sure you are right that it
was too much for Win 3.0. To this day we have the problems of
inadequate processing power to handle certain font features. It is
because MS's Word team fought it, that multiple master technology was
removed from the OpenType spec; and it is only recently that MSW offered
full OT ligature support. True small cap support still seems to have one
or two problems? The MS team always says the program would be too slow if
all these features were available.


MS has built ATM into Windows for decades now; for which they pay no
licensing fee. That was the price Adobe paid to keep PostScript alive.
Then ATM was discontinued as a separate product and built straight into
each Adobe app, so that they would function well with PS fonts regardless
of changes in the OS. QDGX was not accepted by MS only because
Apple demanded a modest licensing fee. If the deal had gone
through, rapid app development would have proceeded in a very similar
manner on both platforms and all the global language problems would have
been addressed where they should be, at system level. Instead, we have
chaos. But it very nearly was order.


At 06/03/2016 18:46, you wrote:

> Bill,
>
> Maybe, but most of us do not need that kind of screen candy. I have
> tinkered with custom printer and screen bitmap fonts for quite a few
> years, and when ATM became available for Win 3.0 that changed everything.
> No more bitmaps, easily editable outlines (using simple tools like
> Fontographer), good printing results every time. When Win 3.1 was
> introduced, the machines of that time choked on TT fonts, which were too
> complicated to handle. While Win 3.0 was on the whole a fragile system,
> Win 3.0 + ATM handled fonts much better than Win 3.1. There are other
> complicated font systems like Agfa's that allow for even finer tweaking
> than TT, but for desktop publishing Type 1 and its descendants has been a
> boon.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Kari Eveli
> LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
> lexitec@xxxxxxxx
>
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>
> > TrueType [...] was capable of
> > vastly better screen output than ATM, Postscript,