Frequently Asked Questions About Fonts ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The comp.fonts FAQ Version 2.1.5. August 14, 1996 Compiled by Norman Walsh Copyright (C) 1992-95 by Norman Walsh . The previous version was 2.1.4. Portions of the OS/2 section are Copyright (C) 1993 by David J. Birnbaum. All rights reserved. Reproduced here by permission. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Subject: Table of Contents 1. General Information 1.1. Font Houses 1.2. What's the difference between all these font formats? 1.3. What about "Multiple Master" fonts? 1.4. Is there a methodology to describe and classify typefaces? 1.5. What is the "f" shaped "s" called? 1.6. What about "Colonial" Typefaces? 1.7. What is "Point Size"? 1.8. Where can I get ... fonts. 1.9. Where can I get fonts for non-Roman alphabets? 1.10. What about fonts with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) s... 1.11. How can I convert my ... font to ... format? 1.12. Are fonts copyrightable? 1.13. Typeface Protection 1.14. File Formats 1.15. Ligatures 1.16. Built-in Fonts 1.17. Glossary 1.18. Bibliography 1.19. Font Encoding Standards 1.20. PostScript 1.21. TrueType 1.22. Unicode 1.23. Can I Print Checks with the MICR Font? 1.24. Rules of Thumb 1.25. Acknowledgements 1.26. A Brief Introduction to Typography 1.27. A Brief History of Type 1.28. The Role of National Orthography in Font Design 1.29. Interesting Fonts 1.30. Pronounciation of Font Names 1.31. What is it? 1.32. Equivalent Font Names 1.33. Digital Type Design Tools 1.34. Type Design Firms 1.35. What does `lorem ipsum dolor' mean? 2. Macintosh Information 2.1. Macintosh Font formats 2.2. Frequently Requested Mac Fonts 2.3. Commercial Font Sources 2.4. Mac Font Installation 2.5. Mac Font Utilities 2.6. Making Outline Fonts 2.7. Problems and Possible Solutions 2.8. Creating Mac screen fonts 3. MS-DOS Information 3.1. Frequently Requested MS-DOS fonts 3.2. MS-DOS Font Installation 3.3. What exactly are the encodings of the DOS code pages? 3.4. MS-DOS Font Utilities 3.5. Converting fonts under MS-DOS 3.5.1. Converting Mac Type 1 fonts to MS-DOS format 3.5.2. Converting PC Type 1 and TrueType fonts to Mac format 3.5.3. Converting PC Type 1 fonts into TeX PK bitmap fonts 3.5.4. Converting TeX PK bitmaps into HP LaserJet softfonts (and vice... 3.5.5. TrueType to HP LaserJet bitmap softfonts (HACK!) 3.6. MS-DOS Screen Fonts (EGA/VGA text-mode fonts) 4. OS/2 Information 4.1. Preliminaries 4.2. Fonts under DOS 4.3. Windows 4.4. Differences between Windows and OS/2 4.5. Installation under Windows and Win-OS/2 4.6. FontSpecific PostScript Encoding 4.7. AdobeStandardEncoding 4.8. AdobeStandardEncoding under Windows (and Win-OS/2) 4.9. AdobeStandardEncoding under OS/2 4.10. Consequences for OS/2 users 4.11. Advice to the user 4.12. OS/2 2.1 and beyond 5. Unix Information 6. Sun Information 6.1. Fonts Under Open Windows 6.1.1. Does OpenWindows support Type 1 PostScript fonts? 6.1.2. Improving font rendering time 6.1.3. Making bitmap fonts for faster startup 6.1.4. Converting between font formats (convertfont, etc.) 6.1.5. Xview/OLIT fonts at 100 dpi 6.2. Where can I order F3 fonts for NeWSprint and OpenWindows? 7. NeXT Information 7.1. Tell me about NeXTstep fonts 7.2. Tell me more about NeXTstep fonts 7.3. Porting fonts to the NeXT 7.4. Font availability 7.5. Why can I only install 256 fonts on my NeXT? 8. Amiga Information 9. Atari ST/TT/Falcon Information 9.1. SpeedoGDOS 9.2. Atari File Formats 9.3. Frequently Requested Atari Fonts 10. X11 Information 10.1. Getting X11 10.2. Historical Notes about X11 10.3. X11 Font Formats 10.4. X11 Font Server 10.5. Fonts and utilities for X11 11. Utilities Information 11.1. How do I convert AFM files to PFM files 11.2. PS2PK 11.3. TeX Utilities 11.4. MFPic 11.5. fig2MF 11.6. GNU Font Utilities 11.7. Font Editors 11.8. The T1 Utilities 11.9. Where to get bitmap versions of the fonts 11.10. Converting between font formats 11.11. Getting fonts by FTP and Mail 11.12. MetaFont to PostScript Conversion 11.13. How to use Metafont fonts with Troff 11.14. PKtoBDF / MFtoBDF 11.15. PKtoPS 11.16. PKtoSFP / SFPtoPK 11.17. PostScript to MetaFont 11.18. Mac Bitmaps to BDF Format 12. Vendor Information Subject: 1. General Information Many FAQs, including this one, are available by anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu in the directory pub/usenet/news.answers. Each posted section of the FAQ is archived under the name that appears in the "Archive-name" header at the top of the article. If you are unable to access rtfm.mit.edu via ftp, you can get the FAQs via email. Send the message "help" to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu. This FAQ is a work in progress. If you have any suggestions, I would be delighted to hear them. After many months of inactivity, I hope to begin a major update on the FAQ. Please send in your comments. And thanks for being patient. This FAQ is maintained in TeXinfo format. A Perl script constructs the postable FAQ from the TeXinfo sources. The FAQ is also available from The comp.fonts Home Page on the World Wide Web: http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/ This is also the site for The Internet Font Archives. TeX DVI, PostScript, Emacs Info, plain text, and HTML versions of this FAQ are available from the web at http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/FAQ.html. FTP access to these archives has been temporarily suspended. The posted version of the FAQ is organized in a quasi-digest format so that it is easy to find the questions you are interested in. All questions that appear in the table of contents can be found by searching for the word "Subject:" followed by the question number. The "TeXinfo" distribution from the Free Software Foundation contains a program called "Info" that can be used to read the Info version of the FAQ in a hypertext manner. The "TeXinfo" distribution can be obtained from prep.ai.mit.edu in the /pub/gnu directory. At the time of this writing, texinfo-2.16.tar.gz is the most recent version. Info files can also be read in hypertext form by GNU Emacs. Future versions of the FAQ will make more use of the hypertext capabilities provided by the Info format. At present, the FAQ is organized as a simple tree. A plain ASCII, postable version of the FAQ will always be maintained. All trademarks used in this document are the trademarks of their respective owners. Standard disclaimers apply. Subject: 1.1. Font Houses This section will be expanded on in the future. It contains notes about various commercial font houses. Adobe Systems, Inc. =================== Adobe Systems Incorporated develops, markets, and supports computer software products and technologies that enable users to create, display, print, and communicate electronic documents. Adobe licenses its technology to major computer and publishing suppliers, and markets a line of type and application software products. Compugraphic ============ See "Miles, Agfa Division" designOnline(tm) ================ Home of Alphabets, Inc., designOnline is the online resource for design. The majority of the interactivity is happening on [their] FirstClass server, currently available by dialup and across the Internet. Miles, Agfa Division ==================== Compugraphic which was for a while the Compugraphic division of Agfa, is now calling itself "Miles, Agfa Division" (yes, the Miles drug company), since CG's off-shore parent Agfa has been absorbed by Miles. So typographically speaking, Compugraphic, CG, Agfa, A-G ag, and Miles all refer to the same company and font library. Their proprietary fonts are still CG Xyz, but the name is Miles Agfa. Quadrat Communications ====================== Quadrat Communications is a digital type foundry based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. [David Vereschagin] began creating and designing type a few years ago, intrigued by the new possibilities presented by Altsys's Fontographer software. [His] first project was the plain style of Clear Prairie Dawn, a sans serif text face, which took three years to complete. As well as designing [his] own faces, [he's] also available for the creation of custom faces. Subject: 1.2. What's the difference between all these font formats? This question is not trivial to answer. It's analogous to asking what the difference is between various graphics image file formats. The short, somewhat pragmatic answer, is simply that they are different ways of representing the same "information" and some of them will work with your software/printer and others won't. At one level, there are two major sorts of fonts: bitmapped and outline (scalable). Bitmapped fonts are falling out of fashion as various outline technologies grow in popularity and support. Bitmapped fonts represent each character as a rectangular grid of pixels. The bitmap for each character indicates precisely what pixels should be on and off. Printing a bitmapped character is simply a matter of blasting the right bits out to the printer. There are a number of disadvantages to this approach. The bitmap represents a particular instance of the character at a particular size and resolution. It is very difficult to change the size, shape, or resolution of a bitmapped character without significant loss of quality in the image. On the other hand, it's easy to do things like shading and filling with bitmapped characters. Outline fonts represent each character mathematically as a series of lines, curves, and 'hints'. When a character from an outline font is to be printed, it must be 'rasterized' into a bitmap "on the fly". PostScript printers, for example, do this in the print engine. If the "engine" in the output device cannot do the rasterizing, some front end has to do it first. Many of the disadvantages that are inherent in the bitmapped format are not present in outline fonts at all. Because an outline font is represented mathematically, it can be drawn at any reasonable size. At small sizes, the font renderer is guided by the 'hints' in the font; at very small sizes, particularly on low-resolution output devices such as screens, automatically scaled fonts become unreadable, and hand-tuned bitmaps are a better choice (if they are available). Additionally, because it is rasterized "on demand," the font can be adjusted for different resolutions and 'aspect ratios'. Werenfried Spit adds the following remark: Well designed fonts are not scalable. I.e. a well designed 5pt font is not simply its 10pt counterpart 50% scaled down. (One can verify this by blowing up some small print in a copier and compare it with large print; or see the example for computer modern in D.E. Knuth's TeXbook.) Although this fact has no direct implications for any of the two methods of font representation it has an indirect one: users and word processor designers tend to blow up their 10pt fonts to 20pt or scale them down to 5pt given this possibility. Subtle details, but well... LaserJet .SFP and .SFL files, TeX PK, PXL, and GF files, Macintosh Screen Fonts, and GEM .GFX files are all examples of bitmapped font formats. PostScript Type 1, Type 3, and Type 5 fonts, Nimbus Q fonts, TrueType fonts, Sun F3, MetaFont .mf files, and LaserJet .SFS files are all examples of outline font formats. Neither of these lists is even close to being exhaustive. To complicate the issue further, identical formats on different platforms are not necessarily the same. For example Type 1 fonts on the Macintosh are not directly usable under MS-DOS or Unix, and vice-versa. It has been pointed out that the following description shows signs of its age (for example, the eexec encryption has been thoroughly hacked). I don't dispute the observation and I encourage anyone with the knowledge and time to submit a more up to date description. It has further been suggested that this commentary is biased toward Kingsley/ATF. The omission of details about Bitstream (and possibly Bauer) may be considered serious since their software lies inside many 3rd-party PostScript interpreters. The moderators of this FAQ would gladly accept other descriptions/ explanations/viewpoints on the issues discussed in this (and every other) section. [Ed Note: Liam R. E. Quin supplied many changes to the following section in an attempt to bring it up to date. Hopefully it is a better reflection of the state of the world today (12/07/92) than it was in earlier FAQs] Henry Schneiker wrote the following description of the differences between several scalable font technologies: ((( semi-quote ))) There has been a lot of confusion about font technologies in recent times, especially when it comes to Type 1 versus Type 3 fonts, "hints," PostScript compatibility, encryption, character regularizing, kerning, and the like. * Encryption (eexec) All fonts produced with Adobe's font technology are protected through data encryption. The decryption is provided by the `eexec' (encrypted execute) PostScript operator and, until recently, was only present in Adobe's licensed PostScript. Adobe has published the details of the Type 1 font format in the `Black Book', Adobe Type 1 Font Format (version 1.1), Adobe Systems Inc., 1990. The encryption was mainly used because of font copyright problems; unencrypted fonts can also be used, but these tend to use an efficient binary encoding, also in documented the Type 1 book, and so are still not readable PostScript. * Type 1, Type 3, and Type 5 font formats There are generally three font formats used in Adobe PostScript printers: Type 1, Type 3, and Type 5. Type 1 fonts are Adobe's downloadable format. Type 3 fonts are third-party downloadable format. Type 5 fonts are the ROM-based fonts that are part of your printer. There is no functional difference between a Type 1, Type 3, or Type 5 font. A Type 3 font can do anything a Type 1 or Type 5 font can do. The only real difference between them is where the `BuildChar' routine comes from. For Type 1 and Type 5 fonts it's built into the printer. For Type 3 fonts it's built into the font. In other words, anything a Type 1 font can do a Type 3 font can also do. [Ed note: the reverse is not true. Type3 fonts can do things that Type1 fonts cannot. But they aren't hinted...] When PostScript is asked to generate a character, PostScript looks in the font's dictionary for FontType. If FontType is 1 or 5 PostScript executes an internal routine that knows how to interpret the font data stored in CharStrings. If FontType is 3 PostScript executes the routine BuildChar from the font's dictionary to interpret the font data (often stored in CharStrings). However, each BuildChar routine is written to read data formatted in a method convenient to the vendor. Adobe, Altsys, Bitstream, and Kingsley/ATF all format their font data differently and, hence, have different BuildChar routines. [Ed note: relative hard disk efficiency of Kingsley vs. Adobe fonts deleted on 12/07/92] Type 5 fonts are special in that they often include hand-tuned bitmaps for the commonly used sizes, such as 10- and 12-point. Other sizes are generated from the outlines in normal fashion. Don't confuse Type 1, Type 3, and Type 5 fonts with Bitstream's Type A, Type B, Type C, and Type F. They are not the same and serve only to confuse the issue. * Resolution `hints' When a character is described in outline format the outline has unlimited resolution. If you make it ten times as big, it is just as accurate as if it were ten times as small. However, to be of use, we must transfer the character outline to a sheet of paper through a device called a raster image processor (RIP). The RIP builds the image of the character out of lots of little squares called picture elements (pixels). The problem is, a pixel has physical size and can be printed only as either black or white. Look at a sheet of graph paper. Rows and columns of little squares (think: pixels). Draw a large `O' in the middle of the graph paper. Darken in all the squares touched by the O. Do the darkened squares form a letter that looks like the O you drew? This is the problem with low resolution (300 dpi). Which pixels do you turn on and which do you leave off to most accurately reproduce the character? All methods of hinting strive to fit (map) the outline of a character onto the pixel grid and produce the most pleasing/recognizable character no matter how coarse the grid is. [Ed note: deleted some paragraphs that are no longer true. Times change...] * Optical Scaling Optical Scaling modifies the relative shape of a character to compensate for the visual effects of changing a character's size. As a character gets smaller, the relative thickness of strokes, the size of serifs, the width of the character, the inter-character spacing, and inter-line spacing should increase. Conversely, as a character gets larger, the relative thickness, widths, and spacing should decrease. Contrast this with linear scaling, in which all parts of a character get larger or smaller at the same rate, making large characters look wide and heavy (strokes are too thick, serifs are too big) while small characters look thin and weak. * Kerning As applied to PostScript fonts, kerning refers to kern pairs. A kern pair specifies two characters (e.g., A and V) and the distance to move the second character relative to the first. The typical use of a kern pair is to remove excessive space between a pair of characters. However, it may also be used to add space. * PostScript clones There are currently several printer manufacturers on the market with PostScript clones. To be viable, a PostScript clone must comply with the `red book' (PS Language Reference Manual). In order to avoid paying royalties to Adobe, and because Adobe's Type 1 font format was originally proprietary, many PostScript interpreters use some other font format. Sun uses F3, and some other vendors use Bitstream's Speedo format, for example. The only real problem this causes is that the widths of characters (the `font metrics') may vary from Adobe's, so that programs that assume the Adobe character widths will produce poor quality output. Bitstream fonts used to be particularly bad in the early days, but they and most or all of the other vendors have solved those problems. * Apple TrueType [Ed note: formerly "Royal (`sfnt')"] format and System 7 Apple's new System 7.0 supports a new format of outline font that will allow high-quality characters of any size to be displayed on the screen. TrueType stores font outlines as B-spline curves along with programmed resolution hints. B-spline curves are faster to compute and easier to manipulate than the Bezier curves used in PostScript. Adobe is not going to support Apple's new format by converting the Adobe/Linotype library to B-spline format. There are two reasons for this: First, there is no support for font encryption (yes, the hooks are there, but nothing is implemented). Second, Adobe does not want to dilute PostScript and its font library. However, the Macintosh is too big a market to simply turn away from. Therefore, Adobe will provide its Font Manager to display its own fonts on the Mac screen. Apple ships Adobe's ATM for this purpose. ((( unquote ))) Subject: 1.3. What about "Multiple Master" fonts? Multiple Master Fonts are an extension to the Adobe font format. providing the ability to interpolate smoothly between several "design axes" from a single font. Design axes can include weight, size, and even some whacko notions like serif to sans serif. Adobes' first Multiple Master Font was Myriad - a two-axis font with WEIGHT (light to black) on one axis, and WIDTH (condensed to expanded) along the other axis. In the case of Myriad, there are four "polar" designs at the "corners" of the design space. The four designs are light condensed, black condensed, light expanded, and black expanded. Given polar designs, you can set up a "weight vector" which interpolates to any point within the design space to produce a unique font for a specific purpose. So you can get a "more or less condensed, somewhat black face". Multiple Master Fonts can be used on any PostScript printer. Multiple Master Fonts need a new PostScript operator known as makeblendedfont. The current crop of Multiple Master Fonts supply an emulation of this operator so the printer doesn't need this operator. A short tutorial on Multiple Master Fonts and makeblendedfont appears in PostScript by Example, by Henry McGilton and Mary Campione, published by Addison-Wesley. Danny Thomas contributes that there are a few PostScript interpreter (version)s which have bugs that appear with the emulation of the makeblendedfont operator used to support Multiple Master fonts. There weren't many exhibiting this problem, though it may have happened even with one Adobe interpreter. Subject: 1.4. Is there a methodology to describe and classify typefaces? There is a standard, Panose, but it is mostly ignored by typographers (not because it's bad, just because they don't need it). The Panose system is documented, among other places, in the Microsoft Windows 3.1 Programmer's Reference from Microsoft Press. The ISO also has a scheme, but it is not Panose. At least one book by a respected authority, Alexander Lawson, Printing Types: An Introduction, describes another, less rigorous system [ed: of his own], which is exposited in "An Introduction" and used without exposition in his later "Anatomy of a Typeface". There is another book, Rookledges International Typefinder, which has a very complete system that uses tell-tales of individual glyphs as well as overall style to index most known faces right in the book. J. Ben Leiberman has another book on type face description. Terry O'Donnell adds the following comments: The current ISO system was initiated (I believe) by Archie Provan of RIT--a successor to Mr. Lawson. Whereas in typographic practice or teaching--only a high level classification is necessary - times have changed and the current ISO system aims to accomplish something beyond the high level. A major goal is to aid software to help users make selections. For example, a naive user might ask for all fonts on a font server which have a Roman old style appearance. Another goal would be to help users with multi-lingual text: a user creating a document in English using e.g. Baskerville wants to know what Arabic or Japanese language font on his system/file server would harmonize well with the Baskerville. It is not all in place yet--but the more detailed ISO classes--and the current addition of non-latin typefaces--are an attempt to address this issue. A second goal is to help with the font substitution problem. Neither ISO or Panose address the metrics issues in font substitution--but both might aid software in picking the nearest style of available available fonts. Subject: 1.5. What is the "f" shaped "s" called? Both the "f" with half a crosbar (roman) and the integral sign (italic) are called long-S. Subject: 1.6. What about "Colonial" Typefaces? Why does colonial printing have that "Colonial" feel? ===================================================== Colonial type was either very roughly treated by moist salt air on the crossing and in colonial port cities, or was copied locally by tacky techniques (such as driving used foundry type into soft lead to make very soft deformable matrices), and the paper was very rough, which abrades both the serifs and the hairlines. So except for the best work done with new, european types, the serifs were much smaller, even broken off, than the original founder/punchcutter intended. Thins could be abraded by rough paper to nothingness, esp after humid salt air had leached the hardener out of the alloy. Peter Honig contributes the following alternative explanation of the roughness of colonial types: The roughness of early fonts was caused by several factors: Type was quite expensive and was used for many years (even if somewhat damaged). Also, printing presses would only be set up to print one side of one folio at a time, so you would not need to set more than a couple of pages at once. This meant that the printer did not need as many copies of each character, however, each character got used very frequently. The early casting techniques did not produce as perfect or consistant examples as we have today. That is, the face of a character might not be quite planar with the page, or its sides might not be quite parallel. Lastly, the inks of the past were not as advanced those of today. What fonts are good for mock-colonial uses? =========================================== For example, what fonts have the following features: old-style figures (non-lining numbers), the long s character, slightly irregular shapes (a la type produced by colonial printers), and a decent complement of ligatures. And what about free or cheap faces like this? I don't know if any exist with all of 1-5. As I believe you get what you pay for, especially in fonts, I haven't looked at free and cheap-copy fonts. Microsoft's expansion set for their Win3.1 optional fonts has Garamond Expert & Expert Extensions, which has a good complement of ligatures and I think I remember it having the long ess too. I forget about OSFigs; it should tho'. Monotype's metal faces "16th Century Roman" and "Poliphilus" may be available in digital; if so, they imitate early presswork with early and are very close to what one wants. "A commercial supplier [not yet sampled] is Image Club Graphics in Calgary (1-800-661-9410). It is called Caslon Antique. It is supplied as both roman and italic, together, for $25. They advertise in MacWorld/MacUser/MacBlah. I am unable to tell from abcDEF123 if the numerals are old-style, but I think not. Ligatures? long-S? Not yet known. Guillemots, though, are there. ... Letraset, circa 1977, showing a Caslon Antique with modern numerals, no ligatures, and only UKPounds and German ss extensions." [Ike Stoddard] NB: Caslon Antique is not a Caslon per se: "The last Caslon to mention is that ubiquitous but unrelated Caslon Antique, which possesses no similarity whatsoever to the original. This old reprobate was introduced by Barnhart Brothers of Chicago under the name Fifteenth Century. Its negative reception lasted until about 1918, when, with a simple name change to Caslon Antique, it became the most commonly selected type for reproductions of colonial American printing. It is now seen in everything from liquor advertisments to furniture commercials" [Lawson, 1990,Anatomy] Miles Agfa (Compugraphic) has always had a Caslon Antique; I don't know if it is available for TrueType or Type 1, but Agfa has been doing TrueType bundles at reasonable prices. [wdr] Peter Honig contributes the following suggestions: Name Year Irreg. Long S OSfig Comment --- --- ----- ----- ---- ------ * Poliphilus A cleaned-up reproduction of type from 1499. It's only slightly irregular and does not contain the long S, but does have old style figures. From Italy, founded by Francesco Griffo. * Old Claude An exact reproduction of Garamond from 1532. It is irregular and does not contain the long S, but it does have old style figures. From France, founded by Claude Garamond. * Blado An exact reproduction of type from 1539. It is irregular and does not contain the long S, but it does have old style figures. From Italy, founded by Antinio Blado (designed by Ludovico delgi Arrighi). * Van Dijck An exact reproduction of type from the 1660s. It is irregular and does not contain the long S, but it does have old style figures. From Holland, founded by Van Dijck. * Adobe Caslon A cleaned-up reproduction of type from the 1720s. It isn't irregular but it does contain the long S, old style figures, and several ligatures. From England, founded by William Caslon. Blado, Poliphilus, and Van Dijck are available from Monotype. Adobe Caslon is available from Adobe. Old Claude is available from Letter Perfect. In my opinion, Old Claude is font that is worthy of close attention. Although it lacks the long S, it is VERY accurately reproduced. Although Adobe Caslon is not irregular, it has a great set of authentic ornaments from the Renaissance and Baroque. It is also the only set that I am aware of, that has the long S and its ligatures. [Bill Troop notes: I do not believe that Monotype ever had a font called 16th Century Roman. You are thinking of a private face created by Paul Hayden-Duensing for his private press based on old Italian punches. It is very rough indeed, but I can assure you no Colonial printer had a typeface as stylish. Poliphilus does indeed exist in digital form, and is fairly faithful, but again is far too stylish to give the proper feel of US Colonial printing. Nor is Antique Caslon, so called, anything to do with the Caslon types used by American printers-except those who used this bogus type at the end of the 19th century. Monotype Bell is a faithful copy of a font that was actually used in the US, but it is far more modern than the Caslon types. Nobody has yet done a really authentic Caslon, and it is a curious fact, but none of the Caslon revivals, in any of metal, photo, or digital formats, has ever been based on the best Caslon sizes. I have been toying with such a revival. Monotype Van Dijk can hardly be called a faithful copy of a metal font; the outlines are far more regular, for instance, than what Monotype did for Bell. In addition, the less interesting forms of the lower case f and f-ligatures were chosen for the digital version, and the alternate f was not supplied. That makes it a very uninteresting font to use in digital form. In addition, the italic has been unbelievably badly spaced in the digital version. (Harry Carter complained about the spacing in the 13pt Roman in the metal version.) For anyone wishing to recreate the feel of early-to-mid 18th century printing, a battered, sensitive revival of Caslon would be desirable. The Giampa version is interesting, but is based on a poor model. ] What fonts could a colonial printer have had? ============================================= According to D.B.Updike in the classic reference "Printing Types: Their History, Forms & Use", he indicates that most colonial work was with types of the Caslon Old Style fonts and cheap copies of same in the 18th C. Before that, it would have been the older Dutch & English faces, almost always lagging English tastes. If you can find the Oxford Fell types, they are classic Dutch-as-used-by-englishmen. Anything with a Dutch moniker and the Oldstyle adjective is probably ok; Van Dijck if you find it, say (died 1673). Ben Franklin recommended Caslon faces. But these were not available in England before 1720, first full broadside in 1734. Lawson declares that the first printing of the Declaration of Independance was in Caslon. Wilson's Scotch Modern was the "modern" font that surfaced in quantity in america. If the Scotch Roman your vendor has is sort-of like-Bodoni but nicer than his Bodoni, that's it. It wasn't available until late 1700s, though. Subject: 1.7. What is "Point Size"? This article was constructed from a posting by William D. Ricker from Sep 1992. In general terms, point size is a relative measure of the size of a font. It used to have a more concrete meaning in the "old days" of typeography. In the world of Photo-typesetters and digital fonts, the distance from the top of the tallest ascender to the bottom of the longest descender is only an approximate lower bound on the point size of a font; in the Old days, it was almost always a firm lower bound, and there was warning on the exception. Point-size is the measure of default or minimum inter-baseline distance; inter line distance in absense of leading, a/k/a "set solid". If you don't know if the text was set solid or leaded, you can't tell the point-size with a measuring glass unless you know if the type design includes built-in space betweed adjacent, set-solid lines. Exceptions to the points size equals ascender to descender size rule: * In metal, there was usually a little room between the highest and lowest corners of the face and the body size, so that the Matrix was completely molding the face and not relying on the mold-body to form a vertical side to the printing face--since a bevel or beard is desirable for impression and strength. * If the designer of a face thinks it should always be set leaded, s/he may choose to include the minimal leading in the design, in which case it is included in the base point size, and no capital, lowercase-ascender, or lowercase-descender will get very near the edges. * In some faces the capitals are taller than the ascenders, and others vice versa. (Vertical sticks on capitals are called stems, not ascenders.) A minimum point size estimate would normally be the height of the font's "envelope", to borrow from Avionics/Aeronautics. * The point size of a "Titling Face" may not include descenders; in which case the Q's tail hangs off the body as a vertical kern. Such a face in metal usually has "Titling" in the name, although sometimes the fact that only capitals are available is all the hint given. ([William D. Ricker's] metal font of Ray Shaded, cast on a Monotype Display caster, has "vertical kerns" if you will: the hanging shaded tail of the Q and some punctuation below the 24pt body, because it has no lower-case. It might be better described as being 36/24, thirty-six point type cast on a twenty-four point body, since the cap A is about the height and density of a Ultrabold 36pt A in many other fonts. It would be called 36/24 Caps if a lowercase had been cast on a 36 point body, but since only UC was ever cut, as UC-only titling, it was standardly issued and refered to as a 24 point titling--much to the confusion of non-cognoscenti.) * The Continental Point, a/k/a the Didot point, (and its Pica Em equivalent, the Cicero) is just a hair longer. 15 Ciceros=16 Picas, 15 Didots=16 Points. So type which is imported or cast from imported matrices has been, and still is, cast on the next size larger body in anglo-american points. So an 11D/12 or 12D/14 type will look larger than a similar 12pt font but smaller than a simlar 14pt font, by about a point of fixed built-in leading that the designer didn't intend. What happened when these faces were converted to photo and digital composition, I don't know. (I could find out.) Probably some were scaled to American sizes proportionally from the european masters, some copied from the American castings with built-in leading to ease conversion, and some were probably done both ways at different conversion houses. Net result: unless you know it's Adobe Times Roman or whatever and just want to know what point size & leading options were, you can't measure the size with a definition and an optical micrometer. The defnition is embodied/manifested in the typesetting "hardware", even if it is software, not the product. Knuth's Assertion ================= What about Knuth's assertion that point size is "a more-or-less arbitrary number that reflects the size of type [a font] is intended to blend with"? That statement is true only in the context of MetaFonts. MetaFonts (and this definition) are perfectly adequate for Knuth's purposes but not fully descriptive of all of typography. And definitely not conformant to established usage. This is not meant to condemn heterodoxy, but just to warn that while the ASCII markup notations in Knuth's "Second Great Work" [TeX and MetaFont] are even more widely disseminated than his wonderful coinage of mathematical notations in "The First Great Work" [The Art of Computer Programming, volumes I, II, and III], MetaFont has not been accepted as an encoding for all useful fonts for the future, and the defintions of font characteristics in MetaFont context must be taken with a large grain of salt when used with fonts outside the MetaFont font-generation paradigm. Knuth's quotation, when applied to a (non-MetaFont) font designer, overstates the arbitrariness of the design choice; the designer was stating in the old days that you'd need a saw, a file, or a caster with his matrices if you wanted to use negative leading to set his type closer than he wanted to see it set; and today, in Photo/digital composition, the designer is either indicating the opinion of the original metal-head or his own design advice as to what the minimum distance between adjacent baselines should be. Also, point size is very poor predictor of blending, except in a mechanical sense in terms of not-overflowing the same rectangles. Some faces to blend in the same line with 12 point type will need to be 10/12 or 14/12, due to differences in the way they fill the space. (The overall leading should fit the body type.) Harmony and contrast of overall color, shape, style, etc. are much more important considerations for blending than body-size. (For two types to work together, there must be sufficient harmonies between them to work together and sufficent contrasts to be easily distinguished. See Carl Dair's books.) If one wants to understand usage of typographical terms in the general milieu, the Chicago Manual of Style's appendix on Typesetting for Authors is a good capsule presentation of history and terminology; if one wants the nitty-gritty on how digital type does, or at least should, differ and be treated differently from just copies of metal, see Richard Rubinstein, Digital Typography, MIT Press. On type in general, consult D.B. Updike in a library (out of print), or A(lexander) S. Lawson (who covers electronic type in his latest revision!). Subject: 1.8. Where can I get ... fonts. Before I go any farther, let me extol the virtues of the Archie servers. If you need to find something on the net, and you have any idea what it might be called, Archie is the place to go. In North America, telnet to "archie.rutgers.edu" and login as "archie". There are many other servers around the world, any Archie server can give you a list of other servers. There are better documents than this to describe Archie and you should be able to find them from the above starting point. If you have trouble, feel free to ask norm (via Email please, no need to clutter comp.fonts with a query about Archie ;-). In addition to the telnet option, several archie clients exist including a very nice X11 implementation (Xarchie). * Adobe Type 1 Fonts in MS-DOS/Unix Format: ftp.cica.indiana.edu:/pub/pc/win3/fonts ftp.cica.indiana.edu:/pub/pc/win3/fonts/atm archive.umich.edu:/msdos/mswindows/fonts * Adobe Type 1 Fonts in Mac Format: mac.archive.umich.edu:/mac/system.extensions/font/type1 sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/font * Adobe Type 3 Fonts in Mac Format: mac.archive.umich.edu:/mac/system.extensions/font/type3 * TrueType fonts in MS-DOS Format: ftp.cica.indiana.edu:/pub/pc/win3/fonts/truetype * TrueType fonts in Mac Format: mac.archive.umich.edu:/mac/system.extensions/font/truetype * TeX PK/PXL/GF fonts: The TeX community has its own support groups that can provide better answers to this question. The canonical list of MetaFont fonts is posted occasionally to comp.text.tex. The comp.text.tex newsgroup (or the Info-TeX mailing list, if you do not have access to news) are good places to start. Email norm if you need more specific information. * LaserJet bitmap fonts: wuarchive.wustl.edu:/mirrors/msdos/laser Also on other simtel20 mirrors... If you know of other archive sites (the above list is no where near complete) or other formats that are available on the net, please let us know. The sites above represent places where shareware and public domain fonts are available. Many, many typefaces are not available in shareware form. And many shareware faces are less than adequate for a variety of reasons, particularly at small sizes. It seems to be the consensus of the comp.fonts community that "you get what you pay for." If you need a professional quality font, you should probably buy it from a professional. The list of font vendors in Appendix A (annotated with information about non-Roman alphabets) was contributed by Masumi Abe. Masumi was Adobe's Manager of Typographic Marketing for Asia. He has since left Adobe. Many font CDs are now available which offer many fonts for a low cost/font. Subject: 1.9. Where can I get fonts for non-Roman alphabets? As mentioned above, the list of font vendors is annotated with information about non-Roman alphabets. Commercially, Masumi suggests that Linguists' Software is the current [ed: as of 7/92] leading supplier of non-Roman fonts. Ian Tresman contributes: The Multilingual PC Directory is a source guide to multilingual and foreign language software, including fonts, for PCs. Over a hundred different languages are included, from Arabic to Hieroglyphics to Zulu. A 1200 word description is available from the publishers, Knowledge Computing, email: 72240.3447@compuserve.com. Subject: 1.10. What about fonts with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols? I summarized Scott Brumage's recent post for the FAQ: Shareware or free (PostScript Type 1 and/or TrueType): ====================================================== * TechPhon Seems to lack some characters and has no zero-offset characters (for accents). * PalPhon A phonetic font which you can get by anonymous ftp from mac.archive.umich.edu. It is called PalPhon. There are actually two fonts: the basic PalPhon and one with additional accents and symbols called PalPi. The package includes some documents on using the fonts as well. * SIL-IPA SIL-IPA is a set of scalable IPA fonts containing the full International Phonetic Alphabet with 1990 Kiel revisions. Three typefaces are included: * SIL Doulos (similar to Times) * SIL Sophia (similar to Helvetica) * SIL Manuscript (monowidth) Each font contains all the standard IPA discrete characters and non-spacing diacritics as well as some suprasegmental and puncuation marks. Each font comes in both PostScript Type 1 and TrueType formats. The fonts are also available for Microsoft Windows. These fonts were designed by the Printing Arts Department of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, Texas. Shareware or free (TeX): ======================== METAFONT sources of the phonetic symbols developed by Tokyo-Shoseki-Printing and Sanseido are available. The font contains all of IPA (Internatioanl Phonetic Alphabet) symbols. You can get phonetic symbols METAFONT (named TSIPA) from ftp.foretune.co.jp:/pub/tools/TeX/Fonts The IP address for ftp.foretune.co.jp is 133.123.1.2. Commercial: =========== Linguist's Software Adobe (ITC Stone Phonetic [#255], Times Phonetic [#278]) This is Info file compfont.info, produced by Makeinfo-1.55 from the input file FAQ.texinfo. Subject: 1.11. How can I convert my ... font to ... format? Conversion from one bitmapped format to another is not generally too difficult. Conversion from one scalable format to another is very difficult. Several commercial software packages claim to perform these tasks, but none has been favorably reviewed by the comp.fonts community. Converting Between TrueType and Adobe Type 1 Formats ==================================================== This section was constructed from postings by Primoz Peterlin and Bert Medley in Sep 1993. There are several commercial tools that will convert between these formats. There are no shareware or free tools that will do the job. See also "Why do converted fonts look so bad?". FontMonger by Ares Software --------------------------- Performs conversion between Adobe Type 1, Adobe Type 3 and TrueType formats in both PC-DOS and Mac flavours, as well as simple glyph editing. Currently at version 1.0.7, patches available via CompuServe. Available for Mac and MS Windows. Commercial product, price \$60-80. Alltype by Atech Software ------------------------- Performs font conversion. A stable product, being on a market for a while. Available for PC-DOS/MS Windows only. Commercial product. Atech is supposedly leaving the business. Fontographer by Altsys Co. -------------------------- Comprehensive package, allowing creation of fonts as well as conversion between formats. Available for Mac and MS Windows. Commercial product, price cca. \$270 (PC version). Metamorphosis by Altsys Co. --------------------------- Available for Mac. Commercial product. More info needed. Converting Between Other Scalable Formats ========================================= Many of the programs in the preceding section claim to be able to convert between other formats as well. And there are probably other commercial programs as well. However, as several people have noted, conversion from one scalable format to another is a bad idea. If the original font was well hinted, the converted font will not be. Of course, if the original was poorly hinted, maybe it won't matter much. In an effort to settle a long-running and oft-asked question, I'll be blunt: as of today [6/93], THERE ARE NO NON-COMMERCIAL PROGRAMS WHICH WILL CONVERT FROM ONE SCALABLE FORMAT TO ANOTHER. Not from TrueType to PostScript Type 1, Type 3, Type 5, or any other scalable PostScript format. Not from PostScript Type 1 to TrueType. Not to or from Intellifont. Not to or from Sun F3 format. For specific conversions, check the platform specific parts of the FAQ. Most of the conversions discussed require platform specific tools. Here is a summary of the conversions discussed (and the section in which they appear): Mac Type 1 PostScript To PC Type 1 PostScript (MS-DOS). To TrueType (commercial). PC Type 1 PostScript To Mac Type 1 PostScript (Mac, commercial). To TrueType (commercial). To TeX PK (MS-DOS). TrueType To Type 1 PostScript (Mac and MS-DOS, commercial). To HP LaserJet bitmaps (MS-DOS, hack!). TeX PK To HP LaserJet bitmap softfonts (MS-DOS). HP LaserJet bitmap softfonts To TeX PK (MS-DOS). In addition, Adobe ships a copy of Adobe Font Foundry with all of its fonts which can convert Type 1 fonts into HP LaserJet softfonts. Why Do Converted Fonts Look So Bad? =================================== This section was constructed from postings by Mark Hastings and David Glenn in Aug 1993. With all commercially available conversion tools, converting fonts between scalable formats almost always results in a font inferior to the original. (The rare case where a converted font is not inferior to the original occurs only when the original is a cheap knock-off, and the automatic hinting of the conversion program is better than automatic hinting used in the original!) David Glenn contributes the following analysis: There are a few probable [reasons why converted fonts, especially screen fonts, look inferior to the original]. First off, any font that's converted uses a converting algorithm which will make an exact copy at best. Because no currently available converter even comes close to copying faithfully the manual tweaks and hinting in a font file, you often end up with poor screen fonts and poor output. The only reason that printed output from the converted font looks markedly better than the screen font is that the printed output is at a higher resolution. The converter achieves better results on the higher resolutions because hinting is less important at higher resolutions. Screen fonts are incredibly complex to make well. You have very few pixels to represent a very aesthetic and distinct design. That's why at small sizes almost all typefaces look alike--how do you represent a graceful concave side on the letter "L" for Optima with only 12 pixels in height and one in width? You can't. And that's why most fonts look similar at 10pt, unless they're hand hinted by typograhers. One thing that may come into play when fonts are converted between platforms, for example between PC/Windows format and Mac format, is that fonts are hinted down to a certain number of pixels per em. On a Mac screen (72 dpi) there is a one-to-one correspondence between the ppem and the point size of a font. Under windows, the usual VGA screen is 96dpi and fonts that look good at 8 or 9 pt under windows might look like crap on a Mac 'cuz the fonts weren't hinted below 10 or 11ppem. Also, the conversion programs may have made the appearance worse at some sizes than others. Whenever you convert fonts from one platform to the other keep in mind that: * Your license with the type foundry may or may not allow this. * The font may or may not have the correct character sets in it. * The TT font file may or may not have all the tables necessary. * Your converter may make it so ugly that you don't want to use it... Smoothing Bitmaps ================= This section was constructed from postings by Jason Lee Weiler and Piercarlo Antonio Grandi Enlarging bitmapped images is easy, but enlarging them without creating very jagged edges is much more demanding. There are several possibilities. * If you are interested in programming your own solution, the comp.graphics FAQ will provide pointers to a number of resources that can get you started. * If the bitmaps are in a standard format, the 'xv' tool (an X11 picture viewing tool) includes magnify and smooth functions that may perform adequately. * Commercial tools like Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, and many others include tracing functions that can translate some bitmaps into acceptable outlines (which can be enlarged without jaggedness). * The GNU Font Utilities include a tracing tool that may be helpful. Subject: 1.12. Are fonts copyrightable? This topic is hotly debated at regular intervals on comp.fonts. Terry Carroll. provides the following analysis of current [ed: as of 6/92] legislation and regulation regarding fonts and copyrights in the United States. Terry is "Editor in Chief" of Volume 10 of the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal. Members of the comp.fonts community are encouraged to submit other materials that add clarity to the issue. It has been pointed out that this section deals primarily font copyright issues relevant to the United States and that this situation is not universal. For example, in many parts of Europe typeface designs are protectable. "First, the short answer in the USA: Typefaces are not copyrightable; bitmapped fonts are not copyrightable, but scalable fonts are copyrightable. Authorities for these conclusions follow. Before we get started, let's get some terminology down: A typeface is a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters. A font is the computer file or program that is used to represent or create the typeface. Now, on to the legal authorities: Volume 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations specifies this about the copyrightability of typefaces: "The following are examples of works not subject to copyright and applications for registration of such works cannot be entertained: . . . typeface as typeface" 37 CFR 202.1(e). The regulation is in accordance with the House of Representatives report that accompanied the new copyright law, when it was passed in 1976: "The Committee has considered, but chosen to defer, the possibility of protecting the design of typefaces. A 'typeface' can be defined as a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters. The Committee does not regard the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable 'pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work' within the meaning of this bill and the application of the dividing line in section 101." H. R. Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Congress, 2d Session at 55 (1976), reprinted in 1978 U.S. Cong. and Admin. News 5659, 5668. It's also in accordance with the one court case I know of that has considered the matter: Eltra Corp. V. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294, 208 USPQ 1 (1978, C.A. 4, Va.). The U.S. Copyright Office holds that a bitmapped font is nothing more than a computerized representation of a typeface, and as such is not copyrightable: "The [September 29, 1988] Policy Decision [published at 53 FR 38110] based on the [October 10,] 1986 Notice of Inquiry [published at 51 FR 36410] reiterated a number of previous registration decisions made by the [Copyright] Office. First, under existing law, typeface as such is not registerable. The Policy Decision then went on to state the Office's position that 'data that merely represents an electronic depiction of a particular typeface or individual letterform' [that is, a bitmapped font] is also not registerable." 57 FR 6201. However, scalable fonts are, in the opinion of the Copyright Office, computer programs, and as such are copyrightable: "... the Copyright Office is persuaded that creating scalable typefonts using already-digitized typeface represents a significant change in the industry since our previous [September 29, 1988] Policy Decision. We are also persuaded that computer programs designed for generating typeface in conjunction with low resolution and other printing devices may involve original computer instructions entitled protection under the Copyright Act. For example, the creation of scalable font output programs to produce harmonious fonts consisting of hundreds of characters typically involves many decisions in drafting the instructions that drive the printer. The expression of these decisions is neither limited by the unprotectable shape of the letters nor functionally mandated. This expression, assuming it meets the usual standard of authorship, is thus registerable as a computer program." 57 FR 6202." Subject: 1.13. Typeface Protection [This article first appeared in TUGboat 7:3 (October 1986), pp. 146-151. Reproduced with permission.] Preamble ======== The main question of typeface protection is: "Is there anything there worth protecting?" To that the answer must certainly be: "Yes." Typeface designs are a form of artistic and intellectual property." To understand this better, it is helpful to look at who designs type, and what the task requires. Who makes type designs? ----------------------- Like other artistic forms, type is created by skilled artisans. They may be called type designers, lettering artists, punch-cutters, calligraphers, or related terms, depending on the milieu in which the designer works and the technology used for making the designs or for producing the type. ("Type designer" and "lettering artist" are self-explanatory terms. "Punch-cutter" refers to the traditional craft of cutting the master image of a typographic letter at the actual size on a blank of steel that is then used to make the matrix from which metal type is cast. Punch-cutting is an obsolete though not quite extinct craft. Seeking a link to the tradition, modern makers of digital type sometimes use the anachronistic term "digital punch-cutter". "Calligrapher" means literally "one who makes beautiful marks". The particular marks are usually hand-written letters, though calligraphers may design type, and type designers may do calligraphy.) It usually takes about seven years of study and practice to become a competent type designer. This seems to be true whether one has a Ph.D. in computer science, a high-school diploma, or no academic degree. The skill is acquired through study of the visual forms and practice in making them. As with geometry, there is no royal road. The designing of a typeface can require several months to several years. A family of typefaces of four different styles, say roman, italic, bold roman, and bold italic, is a major investment of time and effort. Most type designers work as individuals. A few work in partnership (Times Roman(R), Helvetica(R), and Lucida(R) were all, in different ways, the result of design collaboration). In Japan, the large character sets required for a typeface containing Kanji, Katakana, and Hiragana induce designers to work in teams of several people. Although comparisons with other media can only be approximate, a typeface family is an accomplishment on the order of a novel, a feature film screenplay, a computer language design and implementation, a major musical composition, a monumental sculpture, or other artistic or technical endeavors that consume a year or more of intensive creative effort. These other creative activities can be protected by copyright or other forms of intellectual property protection. It is reasonable to protect typefaces in the same way. The problem of plagiarism ------------------------- A lack of protection for typeface designs leads to plagiarism, piracy, and related deplorable activities. They are deplorable because they harm a broad range of people beyond the original designers of the type. First, most type plagiarisms are badly done. The plagiarists do not understand the nature of the designs they are imitating, are unwilling to spend the necessary time and effort to do good work, and consequently botch the job. They then try to fob off their junk on unsuspecting users (authors, editors, and readers). Without copyright, the original designer cannot require the reproducer of a type to do a good job of reproduction. Hence, type quality is degraded by unauthorized copying. Secondly, without protection, designs may be freely imitated; the plagiarist robs the original designer of financial compensation for the work. This discourages creative designers from entering and working in the field. As the needs of typography change (on-line documents and laser printing are examples of technical and conceptual changes) new kinds of typefaces are required. Creative design in response to such needs cannot flourish without some kind of encouragement for the creators. In a capitalist society, the common method is property rights and profit. In a socialist (or, in the past, royalist) society, the state itself might employ type artists. France, as a monarchy and as a republic, has had occasional state sponsorship of typeface design over the past 400 years. The Soviet Union has sponsored the design of new typefaces, not only in the Cyrillic alphabet, but also in the other exotic scripts used by various national groups in the Soviet Union. Those who would justify plagiarism often claim that the type artists do not usually receive a fair share of royalties anyway, since they have usually sold their designs to some large, exploitive corporation. It is true that type designers, like many artists, are often exploited by their "publishers", but plagiarism exacerbates the problem. Plagiarism deprives the designer of decent revenues because it diverts profits to those who merely copied the designs. Plagiarism gives the manufacturer yet another excuse to reduce the basic royalty or other fee paid for typeface designs; the theme song is that the market determines the value of the design and cheap rip-offs debase the value of a face. For those interested in the economic effects of piracy, it is clear that plagiarism of type designs ultimately hurts individual artists far more than it hurts impersonal corporations. Kinds of protection for type ---------------------------- There are five main forms of protection for typefaces: * Trademark * Copyright * Patent * Trade Secret * Ethics Trademark ......... A trademark protects the name of a typeface. In the U.S., most trademarks are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The R in a circle (R) after a trademark or tradename indicates U.S. registration. The similarly placed TM indicates that a trademark is claimed, even if not yet officially registered. However, a trademark may be achieved through use and practice, even without registration. Owners of trademarks maintain ownership by use of the trademark and by litigation to prevent infringement or unauthorized use of the trademark by others. As a few examples of registered typeface trademarks, there are Times Roman (U.S. registration 417,439, October 30, 1945 to Eltra Corporation, now part of Allied); Helvetica (U.S. registration 825,989, March 21, 1967, also to Eltra-Allied), and Lucida (U.S. reg. 1,314,574 to Bigelow & Holmes). Most countries offer trademark registration and protection, and it is common for a typeface name to be registered in many countries. In some cases the registrant may be different than the originator. For example, The Times New Roman (Times Roman) was originally produced by the English Monotype Corporation. In England and Europe, most typographers consider the design to belong to Monotype, but the trademark was registered by Linotype (Eltra-Allied) in the U.S., as noted above. Trademark protection does not protect the design, only the name. Therefore, a plagiarism of a design is usually christened with a pseudonym which in some way resembles or suggests the original trademark, without actually infringing on it. Resemblance without infringement can be a fine distinction. Some pseudonyms for Times Roman are: "English Times", "London", Press Roman, "Tms Rmn". Some for Helvetica are "Helios", "Geneva", "Megaron", "Triumvirate". So far, there seem to be none for Lucida. There are generic typeface classifications used by typographers and type historians to discuss styles, trends, and categories of design. Occasionally these apparently innocuous classification systems are employed by plagiarists to devise generic pseudonyms, such as "Swiss 721" for Helvetica, and "Dutch 801" for Times Roman. It is not certain whether this usage of a generic classification is more for clarification or for obfuscation. In general, the proper tradename is a better indicator of identity, quality, and provenance in typefaces than a generic name. Some people believe that the same is true for other commodities such as wine, where taste is important. A trademark usually consists of both a proprietary and a generic part. For example, in the name "Lucida Bold Italic", "Lucida" is the proprietary trademark part and "Bold Italic" is the generic part. The generic word "type" is usually understood to be a part of the name, e.g. "Lucida Bold Italic type". Sometimes a firm will append its name or a trademarked abbreviation of it to the typeface name, to achieve a greater degree of proprietary content, e.g. "B&H Lucida Bold Italic". A related matter is the use of the name of a type's designer. A firm that ethically licenses a typeface will often cite the name of the designer-- e.g. Stanley Morison (with Victor Lardent) for Times Roman, Max Miedinger (with Edouard Hoffmann) for Helvetica, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes for Lucida. Although a person's name is not usually a registered trademark, there are common law restrictions on its use. The marketing of plagiarized type designs generally omits the names of the designers. Although Trademark is an incomplete kind of protection, it is used effectively (within its limitations) to prevent the theft of type names. Certain traditional typeface names, usually the surnames of illustrious designers like Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville, Bodoni, and others have become generic names in the public domain. Trademark protection of such names requires the addition of some proprietary word(s), as with these hypothetical creations, "Acme New Garamond", or "Typoluxe Meta-Baskerville". Copyright ......... Copyright of typefaces can be divided into two parts: copyright of the design itself; and copyright of the font in which the design is implemented. In the U.S., typeface designs are currently not covered by copyright. This is a result of reluctance by the copyright office to deal with a complex field; by lobbying against copyright by certain manufacturers whose profits were based on typeface plagiarism; by a reluctance of Congress to deal with the complex issues in the recent revision of the copyright law. The reluctance of Americans to press for typeface copyright may have been influenced by a feeling that typeface plagiarism was good for U.S. high-tech businesses who were inventing new technologies for printing, and plagiarizing types of foreign origin (Europe and England). If the situation becomes reversed, and foreign competition (from Japan, Taiwan, and Korea) threatens to overcome American technological superiority in the laser printer industry, then American firms may do an about-face and seek the protection of typeface copyright to help protect the domestic printer industry. Such a trend may already be seen in the licensing of typeface trademarks by Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Imagen, and Xerox in the U.S. laser printer industry. In Germany, where typeface design has always been a significant part of the cultural heritage, and where typefounding has remained an important business, there are more than one kind of copyright-like protections for typefaces. Certain long-standing industrial design protection laws have been used to protect typeface designs in litigation over royalties and plagiarisms. Further, there is a recent law, the so-called "Schriftzeichengesetz" enacted in 1981, that specifically protects typeface designs. New designs are registered, as is done with copyright in most countries. This law only protects new, original designs. It is available to non-German designers and firms. Therefore, some type firms and designers routinely copyright new designs in West Germany. This gives a degree of protection for products marketed in Germany. Since multinational corporations may find it cheaper to license a design for world-wide use rather than deal with a special case in one country, the German law does encourage licensing on a broader scale than would initially seem to be the case. France, like Germany, has ratified an international treaty for protection of typefaces. This 1973 Vienna treaty will become international law when four nations ratify it. So far, only France and West Germany have done so, and thus a design must be protected separately in each country. Even when the treaty becomes law, it will take effect only in those countries that have ratified it. The treaty was principally the work of the late Charles Peignot, a French typefounder, and John Dreyfus, an English typographer and typographic scholar. Presently, typefaces may be registered for protection in France under a 19th century industrial design protection law. In the U.S., there continues to be some movement for typeface design protection. A proposed bill that would protect the designs of useful articles, like type, has been in committee for a few years. It seems to be going nowhere. Digital (as opposed to analog) fonts may be protected by copyright of digital data and of computer programs. It has been established that computer software is copyrightable. Therefore, software that embodies a typeface, e.g. a digital font, is presumably also protected. There is some objection to this kind of copyright, on the grounds that the ultimate output of the program or the result of the data (i.e. a typeface design) is not copyrightable. However, the current belief expressed by the National Commission on New Technological Use of Copyrighted Works is that software is copyrightable even if its function is to produce ultimately a non-copyrightable work. Hence, typefaces produced by Metafont or PostScript(R), two computer languages which represent fonts as programs, are presumably copyrightable. Typefaces represented as bit-map data, run-length codes, spline outlines, and other digital data formats, may also be copyrightable. Some firms do copyright digital fonts as digital data. % The copyright office is currently reviewing %this practice to determine if it is acceptable. Note that the designs themselves are still not protected in the U.S. A plagiarist could print out large sized letters (say, one per page) on an Apple LaserWriter, using a copyrighted PostScript digital font, and then redigitize those letters by using a scanner or a font digitizing program and thus produce a new digital font without having copied the program or digital data, and thus without infringing the copyright on the font. The quality of the imitation font would usually be awful, but it wouldn't violate copyright. Of course, the plagiarist would usually need to rename the font to evade trademark infringement. [As I write these words, I have the guilty feeling that I have just provided a recipe for type rip-off, but others have obviously thought of just such a scheme--John Dvorak has even proposed something like it in one of his columns.] Design Patent ............. The designs of typefaces may be patented in the U.S. under existing design patent law. Many designs are patented, but type designers generally don't like the patent process because it is slow, expensive, and uncertain. Nevertheless, some types do get patented, and it is a form of potential protection. Note that this is Design Patent--the typeface doesn't have to be a gizmo that does something, it merely has to be unlike any previous typeface. The drawback here is that most attorneys and judges are not aware that there are more than two or three typefaces: say, handwriting, printing, and maybe blackletter. Therefore, litigating against infringement is an educational as well as a legal process. It is easy to see that typeface theft is more subtle than knocking over a liquor store; it may not be illegal and the returns may be greater. Protections like design patent are available in many other countries, but there is not an international standard (to my knowledge) so the situation must be examined on a country by country basis. Invention Patent ................ Methods of rendering typefaces can be patented as mechanical or electronic inventions. For example, the old hot-metal Linotype machinery was protected by various patents, as was the IBM Selectric typewriter and type ball. IBM neglected to trademark the typeface names like Courier and Prestige, so once the patents had lapsed, the names gradually fell into the public domain without IBM doing anything about it (at the time, and for a dozen years or so, IBM was distracted by a major U.S. anti-trust suit). Most students of the type protection field believe that those names are probably unprotectable by now, though IBM could still presumably make a try for it if sufficiently motivated. There is currently a noteworthy development regarding a patent for outline representation of digital type as arcs and vectors, with special hardware for decoding into rasters. This patent (U.S. 4,029,947, June 14, 1977; reissue 30,679, July 14, 1981) is usually called the Evans & Caswell patent, after its inventors. It was originally assigned to Rockwell, and in 1982, Rockwell sued Allied Linotype for infringement. Allied settled out of court, having paid an amount rumored to be in the millions. Rockwell sold the patent, along with other typographic technology, to Information International, Inc. (III), which then sued Compugraphic for infringement. According to the Seybold Report, a respected typographic industry journal, Compugraphic recently settled out of court for 5 million dollars. Although many experts believe the patent to be invalid because of several prior inventions similar in concept, it nevertheless seems to be a money-maker in corporate litigation. The Seybold Report has speculated on which firms III would litigate against next. Among the candidates suggested by the Seybolds was Apple for its LaserWriter, which uses outline fonts. Since the entire laser printer industry and the typesetting industry is moving toward outline font representation, Apple is certainly not alone. The Seybolds further speculate on whether the difference between character-by-character CRT typesetting and raster-scan laser typesetting and printing would be legally significant in such a case. Ultimately, some firm will hold out for a court judgement, and the matter will be decided. %Although the Evans & Caswell patent doesn't have much to do with %typeface copyright per se, it does make many font vendors nervous. Trade Secret ............ Given that typeface designs have relatively little copyright protection in the U.S., they are often handled as trade secrets. The secret must apply to the digital data or programs only, because the images themselves are ultimately revealed to the public as printed forms. It is much more difficult to reconstruct the formula of Coca-Cola from its taste than it is to reconstruct the design of Helvetica from its look on the page. The exact bitmap or spline outline of a digital font is usually not reconstructable from the printed image, although CRT screen fonts at usual resolutions (60-120 dots per inch) may be reconstructed by patient counting and mapping of bits off a screen display. Typeface licenses often contain stipulations that the digital data will be encrypted and confidential. Just as a firm will protect the secret of a soft drink recipe, so a type firm will protect the exact nature of its digital data. Ethics ...... Some typographers are motivated by higher principles than greed, profit, expediency, and personal interest. Idealists afflicted with concepts of ethical behavior and a vision of typography as a noble art may find it distasteful to use plagiarized types. Some graphic designers insist on using typefaces with bona-fide trademarks, both to ensure that the type will be of high quality, and to encourage creativity and ethics in the profession. A consequence of plagiarism that is sometimes overlooked is a general erosion of ethics in an industry. If it is okay to steal typeface designs, then it may be okay to purloin other kinds of data, to falsify one's resume, to misrepresent a product, and so forth. Most professional design organizations attempt to promote ethical standards of professional behavior, and personal standards may extend to avoidance of plagiarism. The Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) is an international organization of type designers, type manufacturers, and letterform educators. Its purpose is to promote ethical behavior in the industry, advancement of typographic education, communication among designers, and other lofty aims. Members of ATypI agree to abide by a moral code that restricts plagiarism and other forms of depraved behavior (pertaining to typography). These are noble goals, but some members (especially corporate members) of ATypI, confronted with the pressures and opportunities of commercial reality, nevertheless plagiarize typefaces of fellow members, the moral code notwithstanding. Since ATypI is a voluntary organization, there is very little that can be done about most such plagiarism. Some years back, a world-famous type designer resigned %the noted type designer Hermann Zapf from the ATypI Board of Directors in protest over the organization's flaccid attitude toward plagiarists among its ranks. He has since agreed to sit on the board again, but criticism of the organization's inability to prevent type rip-offs by its own members, not to mention by non-members, continues to be heard. Moderates in ATypI believe that a few morals are better than none. It is not clear whether their philosophical stance derives from Plato, Hobbes, or Rousseau. Given the general attitude of users toward copyrighted video and software, it is doubtful that ethical considerations will hinder most end-users' attitude to plagiarized type fonts. A desire to have the fashionable "label" or trademark may be a greater motivation toward the use of bona-fide fonts than an ethical consideration. Further reading --------------- "The State of the Art in Typeface Design Protection", Edward Gottschall, Visible Language, Vol. XIX, No. 1, 1985 (a special issue on "The Computer and the Hand in Type Design"--proceedings of a conference held at Stanford University in August, 1983). Der Schutz Typographischer Schriftzeichen, by Guenter Kelbel. Carl Heymans Verlag KG, Cologne, 1984. (A learned account, in juridical German prose, of the significance of the Vienna Treaty of 1973 and the West German Schriftzeichengesetz of 1981.) Disclaimer ---------- These notes were originally prepared at the request of Brian Reid, for informal distribution. They are based on the author's review of available literature on the subject of typeface protection, and on personal experience in registering types for trademark, copyright, and patent. However, they are %While they result from careful research, no claim is made for accuracy; not legal advice. If one is contemplating protecting or plagiarizing a typeface, and seeks legal opinion, it is advisable to consult an attorney. The term "plagiarize" (and words derived from it) is used here in its dictionary sense of "to take and use as one's own the ideas of another" and does not mean that the practice of typeface plagiarism is illegal, as that is determined by the laws of a particular country. The author is a professor of digital typography as well as a professional designer of original digital typefaces for electronic printers and computer workstations. He therefore has an obvious bias toward the inculcation of ethical standards and the legal protection of artistic property. Other commentators might have a different perspective. Subject: 1.14. File Formats Many different kinds of files are available on the net. These files contain many different kinds of data for many different architectures. Frequently, the extension (trailing end) of a filename gives a good clue as to the format of its contents and the architecture that it was created on. In order to save space, most files on the net are compressed in one way or another. Many compression/decompression programs exist on multiple architectures. Multiple files and directories are often combined into a single `archive' file. Many archive formats perform compression automatically. File Format Extensions ====================== * .tar Unix `tape archive' format. Tar files can contain multiple files and directories. Unlike most archiving programs, tar files are held together in a wrapper but are not automatically compressed by tar. * .Z Unix `compress' format. Compression doesn't form a wrapper around multiple files, it simply compresses a single file. As a result, you will frequently see files with the extension .tar.Z. This implies that the files are compressed tar archives. * .z .gz GNU zip format. GNU zip doesn't form a wrapper around multiple files, it simply compresses a single file. As a result, you will frequently see files with the extension .tar.z or .tar.gz. This implies that the files are compressed tar archives. Do not confuse GNU Zip and PKZip or GNU Zip and Unix compress, those are three different programs! * .hqx Macintosh `BinHex' format. In order to reliably transfer Mac files from one architecture to another, they are BinHex encoded. This is actually an ascii file containing mostly hexadecimal digits. It is neither a compression program nor an archive format. * .sit Macintosh `Stuffit' archive. * .cpt Macintosh `Compactor' archive. Like the .tar.Z format that is common among Unix archives, Macintosh archives frequently have the extensions .sit.hqx or .cpt.hqx indicating a BinHex'ed archive. * .arc PC `arc' archive. This is an older standard (in PC terms, at least) and has gone out of fashion. * .zip PC `zip' archive. This is the most common PC archive format today. * .arj PC `arj' archive. * .zoo PC `zoo' archive * .lzh PC `lha/lharc' archive. * .uue `UUencoding' format. In order to reliably transfer binary data across architectures (or through email), they are frequently uuencoded. This is actually an ascii file. It is neither a compression program nor an archive format. Font Formats ============ Just as the are many, many archive formats, there are many different font formats. The characteristics of some of these formats are discussed below. Once again, the file extension may help you to determine the font type. (On the Mac, the resource TYPE field is (probably) a better indicator). * PostScript Type 1 Fonts: Postscript Type 1 fonts (Also called ATM (Adobe Type Manager) fonts, Type 1, and outline fonts) contains information, in outline form, that allows a postscript printer, or ATM to generate fonts of any size. Most also contain hinting information which allows fonts to be rendered more readable at lower resolutions and small type sizes. * PostScript Type 3 Fonts: Postscript type 3 fonts are an old outline font format that is not compatible with ATM. Most developers have stopped using this format except in a few special cases, where special type 3 characteristics (pattern fills inside outlines, for example) have been used. * TrueType Fonts: Truetype fonts are a new font format developed by Microsoft with Apple. The rendering engine for this font is built into system 7 and an init, the Truetype init, is available for system 6 (freeware from Apple). It is also built into MS Windows v3.1. Like PostScript Type 1 and Type 3 fonts, it is also an outline font format that allows both the screen, and printers, to scale fonts to display them in any size. * Bitmap Fonts: Bitmap fonts contain bitmaps of fonts in them. This a picture of the font at a specific size that has been optimized to look good at that size. It cannot be scaled bigger without making it look horrendously ugly. On the Macintosh, bitmap fonts also contain the kerning information for a font and must be installed with both type 1 and type 3 fonts. Their presence also speeds the display of commonly used font sizes. Font Format Extensions ====================== * .afm Adobe Type 1 metric information in `ascii' format (human parsable) * .bco Bitstream compressed outline * .bdf Adobe's Bitmap Distribution Format. This format can be converted to the platform specific binary files required by the local X Windows server. This is a bitmap font format distributed in ASCII. * .bez Bezier outline information * .cfn Calamus Font Notation. Vector font format, without hinting, but with greater accuracy when compared to Type 1 fonts. Used by a.o. Calamus (Atari, Windows NT), a DTP program with Soft RIP. * .chr Borland stroked font file * .ff, .f3b, .fb Sun formats. More info when I know more... * .fli Font libraries produced by emTeX fontlib program. Used by emTeX drivers and newer versions of dvips. * .fnt Bitmapped GEM font in either Motorola or Intel format. * .fon An MS-Windows bitmapped font. * .fot An MS-Windows kludge for TrueType fonts. The fot file points to the actual TrueType font (in a ttf file). * .gf Generic font (the output of TeX's MetaFont program (possibly others?)) * .mf TeX MetaFont font file (text file of MetaFont commands) * .pfa Adobe Type 1 Postscript font in ASCII format (PC/Unix) I believe that this format is suitable for directly downloading to your PostScript printer (someone correct me if I'm wrong ;-) * .pfb Adobe Type 1 PostScript font in "binary`' format (PC/Unix) Note: this format is not suitable for downloading directly to your PostScript printer. There are utilities for conversion between PFB and PFA (see the utilities section of the FAQ). * .pfm Printer font metric information in Windows format * .pk TeX packed bitmap font file (also seen as .###pk where ### is a number) * .pl TeX `property list' file (a human readable version of .tfm) * .ps Frequently, any PostScript file. With respect to fonts, probably a Type3 font. This designation is much less `standard' than the others. Other non-standard extensions are .pso, .fon, and .psf (they are a mixture of type 1 and type 3 fonts). * .pxl TeX pixel bitmap font file (obsolete, replaced by .pk) * .sfl LaserJet bitmapped softfont, landscape orientation * .sfp LaserJet bitmapped softfont, portrait orientation * .sfs LaserJet scalable softfont * .spd Vector font in Speedo format. * .tdf Vector font type definitions for Speedo fonts. * .tfm TeX font metric file. Also an HP Tagged Font Metric file. * .ttf An MS-Windows TrueType font. * .vf TeX virtual font which allows building of composite fonts (a character can be composed of any sequence of movements, characters (possibly from multiple fonts) rules and TeX specials) * .vpl TeX `property list' (human readable) format of a .vf Subject: 1.15. Ligatures A ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. Generally, ligatures replace characters that occur next to each other when they share common components. Ligatures are a subset of a more general class of figures called "contextual forms." Contextual forms describe the case where the particular shape of a letter depends on its context (surrounding letters, whether or not it's at the end of a line, etc.). One of the most common ligatures is "fi". Since the dot above a lowercase 'I' interferes with the loop on the lowercase 'F', when 'f' and 'i' are printed next to each other, they are combined into a single figure with the dot absorbed into the 'f'. An example of a more general contextual form is the greek lowercase sigma. When typesetting greek, the selection of which 'sigma' to use is determined by whether or not the letter occurs at the end of the word (i.e., the final position in the word). * Amanda Walker provides the following discussion of ligatures: Ligatures were originally used by medieval scribes to conserve space and increase writing speed. A 14th century manuscript, for example, will include hundreds of ligatures (this is also where "accents" came from). Early typefaces used ligatures in order to emulate the appearance of hand-lettered manuscripts. As typesetting became more automated, most of these ligatures fell out of common use. It is only recently that computer based typesetting has encouraged people to start using them again (although 'fine art' printers have used them all along). Generally, ligatures work best in typefaces which are derived from calligraphic letterforms. Also useful are contextual forms, such as swash capitals, terminal characters, and so on. A good example of a computer typeface with a rich set of ligatures is Adobe Caslon (including Adobe Caslon Expert). It includes: Upper case, lower case, small caps, lining numerals, oldstyle numerals, vulgar fractions, superior and inferior numerals, swash italic caps, ornaments, long s, and the following ligatures: ff fi fl ffi ffl Rp ct st Sh Si Sl SS St (where S=long s) [Ed: Another common example is the Computer Modern Roman typeface that is provided with TeX. this family of fonts include the ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl ligatures which TeX automatically uses when it finds these letters juxtaposed in the text.] While there are a large number number of possible ligatures, generally only the most common ones are actually provided. In part, this is because the presence of too many alternate forms starts reducing legibility. A case in point is Luxeuil Miniscule, a highly-ligatured medieval document hand which is completely illegible to the untrained eye (and none too legible to the trained eye, either :)). * Don Hosek offers the following insight into ligatures: Ligatures were used in lead type, originally in imitation of calligraphic actions (particularly in Greek which retained an excessive number of ligatures in printed material as late as the 19th century), but as typefaces developed, ligatures were retained to improve the appearance of certain letter combinations. In some cases, it was used to allow certain letter combinations to be more closely spaced (e.g., "To" or "Vo") and were referred to as "logotypes". In other cases, the designs of two letters were merged to keep the overall spacing of words uniform. Ligatures are provided in most contemporary fonts for exactly this reason. * Liam Quin makes the following observations: The term ligature should only be used to describe joined letters in printing, not letters that overlap in manuscripts. Many (not all) accents came from the practice of using a tilde or other mark to represent an omitted letter, so that for example the Latin word `Dominus' would be written dns, with a tilde or bar over the n. This is an abbreviation, not a ligature. Most ligatures vanished during the 15th and 16th Centuries. It was simply too much work to use them, and it increased the price of book production too much. [Ed: there is no "complete" set of ligatures.] This is Info file compfont.info, produced by Makeinfo-1.55 from the input file FAQ.texinfo. Subject: 1.16. Built-in Fonts * PostScript printers (and Adobe Type Manager) with 13 fonts have: Courier, Courier-Bold, Courier-BoldOblique, Courier-Oblique, Helvetica, Helvetica-Bold, Helvetica-BoldOblique, Helvetica-Oblique, Symbol, Times-Bold, Times-BoldItalic, Times-Italic, Times-Roman * Postscript printers with 17 fonts have: Courier, Courier-Bold, Courier-BoldOblique, Courier-Oblique, Helvetica, Helvetica-Bold, Helvetica-BoldOblique, Helvetica-Narrow, Helvetica-Narrow-Bold, Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique, Helvetica-Narrow-Oblique, Helvetica-Oblique, Symbol, Times-Bold, Times-BoldItalic, Times-Italic, Times-Roman * Postscript printers with 35 fonts have: All of the above, plus the following: ZapfChancery-MediumItalic, ZapfDingbats, AvantGarde-Book, AvantGarde-BookOblique, AvantGarde-Demi, AvantGarde-DemiOblique, Bookman-Demi, Bookman-DemiItalic, Bookman-Light, Bookman-LightItalic, NewCenturySchlbk-Bold, NewCenturySchlbk-BoldItalic, NewCenturySchlbk-Italic, NewCenturySchlbk-Roman, Palatino-Bold, Palatino-BoldItalic, Palatino-Italic, Palatino-Roman * HP LaserJet printers (II, IIP) Courier 10, Courier 12, LinePrinter 16.66, ... * HP LaserJet printers (III, IIIP) All of the above, plus the following: Scalable Times Roman and Scalable Univers using Compugraphic's Intellifont hinted font format. * HP LaserJet IV printers All of the above, plus the following scalable (Intellifont) faces: Courier, Courier Bold, Courier Italic, Courier Bold Italic, CG Times, CG Times Bold, CG Times Italic, CG Times Bold Italic CG Omega, CG Omega Bold, CG Omega Italic, CG Omega Bold Italic Coronet, Clarendon Condensed Univers Medium, Univers Bold, Univers Medium Italic, Univers Bold Italic Univers Medium Condensed, Univers Bold Condensed, Univers Medium Condensed Italic, Univers Bold Condensed Italic Antique Olive, Antique Olive Bold, Antique Olive Italic Garamond Antiqua, Garamond Halbfett, Garamond Kursiv, Garamond Kursiv Halbfett Marigold, Albertus Medium, Albertus Extra Bold Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic Times New, Times New Bold, Times New Italic, Times New Bold Italic Symbol, Wingdings, Letter Gothic, Letter Gothic Bold, Letter Gothic Italic * SPARCPrinters The basic 35 fonts plus four scaled faces of each of Bembo, Gill Sans, Rockwell, Lucida, Lucida Bright, Sans and Typewriter, giving a total of 57 fonts, all in the F3 format. Subject: 1.17. Glossary [ I ripped this right out of the manual I wrote for Sfware. If you have comments, improvements, suggestions, please tell me... ] anti-aliasing [ed: this is an 'off-the-cuff' definition, feel free to clarify it for me ;-) ] On low-resolution bitmap devices (where ragged, ugly characters are the norm) which support more than two colors, it is possible to provide the appearance of higher resolution with anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing uses shaded pixels around the edges of the bitmap to give the appearance of partial-pixels which improves the apparent resolution. baseline The baseline is an imaginary line upon which each character rests. Characters that appear next to each other are (usually) lined up so that their baselines are on the same level. Some characters extend below the baseline ("g" and "j", for example) but most rest on it. bitmap A bitmap is an array of dots. If you imagine a sheet of graph paper with some squares colored in, a bitmap is a compact way of representing to the computer which squares are colored and which are not. In a bitmapped font, every character is represented as a pattern of dots in a bitmap. The dots are so small (300 or more dots-per-inch, usually) that they are indistinguishable on the printed page. character (1) The smallest component of written language that has semantic value. Character refers to the abstract idea, rather than a specific shape (see also glyph), though in code tables some form of visual representation is essential for the reader's understanding. (2) The basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding, 16 bits of information. (3) Synonym for "code element". (4) The English name for the ideographic written elements of Chinese origin. download Downloading is the process of transferring information from one device to another. This transferral is called downloading when the transfer flows from a device of (relatively) more power to one of (relatively) less power. Sending new fonts to your printer so that it "learns" how to print characters in that font is called downloading. font A particular collection of characters of a typeface with unique parameters in the 'Variation vector', a particular instance of values for orientation, size, posture, weight, etc., values. The word font or fount is derived from the word foundry, where, originally, type was cast. It has come to mean the vehicle which holds the typeface character collection. A font can be metal, photographic film, or electronic media (cartridge, tape, disk). glyph (1) The actual shape (bit pattern, outline) of a character image. For example, an italic 'a' and a roman 'a' are two different glyphs representing the same underlying character. In this strict sense, any two images which differ in shape constitute different glyphs. In this usage, "glyph" is a synonym for "character image", or simply "image". (2) A kind of idealized surface form derived from some combination of underlying characters in some specific context, rather than an actual character image. In this broad usage, two images would constitute the same glyph whenever they have essentially the same topology (as in oblique 'a' and roman 'a'), but different glyphs when one is written with a hooked top and the other without (the way one prints an 'a' by hand). In this usage, "glyph" is a synonym for "glyph type," where glyph is defined as in sense 1. hints When a character is described in outline format the outline has unlimited resolution. If you make it ten times as big, it is just as accurate as if it were ten times as small. However, to be of use, we must transfer the character outline to a sheet of paper through a device called a raster image processor (RIP). The RIP builds the image of the character out of lots of little squares called picture elements (pixels). The problem is, a pixel has physical size and can be printed only as either black or white. Look at a sheet of graph paper. Rows and columns of little squares (think: pixels). Draw a large `O' in the middle of the graph paper. Darken in all the squares touched by the O. Do the darkened squares form a letter that looks like the O you drew? This is the problem with low resolution (300 dpi). Which pixels do you turn on and which do you leave off to most accurately reproduce the character? All methods of hinting strive to fit (map) the outline of a character onto the pixel grid and produce the most pleasing/recognizable character no matter how coarse the grid is. kerning (noun): That portion of a letter which extends beyond its width, that is, the letter shapes that overhang - the projection of a character beyond its sidebearings. (verb): To adjust the intercharacter spacing in character groups (words) to improve their appearance. Some letter combinations ("AV" and "To", for example) appear farther apart than others because of the shapes of the individual letters. Many sophisticated word processors move these letter combinations closer together automatically. outline font/format See 'scalable font' point The (more or less) original point system (Didot) did have exactly 72 points to the inch. The catch is that it was the French imperial inch, somewhat longer than the English inch, and it went away in the French revolution. What most people now think of as points were established by the United States Typefounders Association in 1886. This measure was a matter of convenience for the members of the Association, who didn't want to retool any more than they had to, so it had no relationship to the inch. By that date, people realized that the inch was an archaic measure anyway; the point was set to be 1/12 of a pica, and an 83-pica distance was made equal to 35 centimeters. (Talk about arbitrary!) Thus the measure of 72.27/in. is just an approximation. Of course, when PostScript was being written, it was necessary to fit into an inch-measured world. For the sake of simplicity PostScript defined a point as exactly 1/72". With the prevalance of DTP, the simplified point has replaced the older American point in many uses. Personally, I don't see that it matters one way or the other; all that counts is that there's a commonly-understood unit of measurement that allows you to get the size you think you want. That is, after all, the point ;) scalable font A scalable font, unlike a bitmapped font, is defined mathematically and can be rendered at any requested size (within reason). softfont A softfont is a bitmapped or scalable description of a typeface or font. They can be downloaded to your printer and used just like any other printer font. Unlike built-in and cartridge fonts, softfonts use memory inside your printer. Downloading a lot of softfonts may reduce the printers ability to construct complex pages. symbol set The symbol set of a font describes the relative positions of individual characters within the font. Since there can only be 256 characters in most fonts, and there are well over 256 different characters used in professional document preparation, there needs to be some way to map characters into positions within the font. The symbol set serves this purpose. It identifies the "map" used to position characters within the font. typeface The features by which a character's design is recognized, hence the word face. Within the Latin language group of graphic shapes are the following forms: Uncial, Blackletter, Serif, Sans Serif, Scripts, and Decorative. Each form characterizes one or more designs. Example: Serif form contains four designs called Old Style, Transitional, Modern, and Slab Serif designs. The typeface called Bodoni is a Modern design, while Times Roman is a Transitional design. Subject: 1.18. Bibliography Editors note: the following books have been suggested by readers of comp.fonts. They are listed in no particular order. I have lost the citations for some of the submissions. If you wrote a review that appears below and you aren't credited, please let norm know. I have decided that this is the best section for pointers to other font resources (specs and other documents, for example). These appear after the traditional bibliographic entries. As usual I will happily accept entries for this section. As of 9/92, the only files listed are the TrueType font information files available from Microsoft. Bill Ricker contributed the following general notes: The Watson-Guptill, Godine, and Dover publishers all have many typography titles. Godine and Dover tend to be excellent; W-G tends toward 'how-to' books which are good for basics and juried Annuals of job work. Hermann Zapf and his Design Philosophy, Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, 1987. On Stone -- The Art and Use of Typography on the Personal Computer, Sumner Stone, Bedford Arts, 1991. Of the Just Shaping of Letters, Albrecht Durer, isbn 0-486-21306-4. First published in 1525 as part of his theoretical treatise on applied geometry, "The Art of Measurment". Champ Flevry, Geofroy Troy. First published in 1529 Troy attempts, in this book, to design an ideal Roman alphabet upon geometrical and aesthetic principles. The Alphabet & Elements of Lettering, Frederic W. Goudy, isbn 0-486-20792-7. Revised 1942 edition. This very interesting book looks at the history of letter shapes as well font design. The Mac is Not a Typewriter, Robin Williams, Peachpit Press. A good, clear explanation of what typography is, and how to get it from your computer. Mac-specific, but full of excellent general advice. I think there's also a PC version. Available at most computer bookstores Rhyme and Reason: A Typographic Novel, Erik Spiekermann, H. Berthold AG, ISBN 3-9800722-5-8. Printing Types (2 vols), Daniel Berkely Updike, Dover Press. Affordable edition of the most readable history of type, lots of illustrations. Notes: Both the Dover and Harvard U. P. editions were 2 volumes. The Dover editions were paperback and the Harvard hardback. It appears that the Dover edition is out of print. Collectible HUP editions are not cheap although later HUP editions may be had. Most libraries have later HUP and Dover editions. If someone knows of a source, please pass it along. The Art of Hand Lettering, Helm Wotzkow, Dover Press, reprint from 1952. Looking Good In Print, Roger C. Parker, Ventana Press, ISBN: 0-940087-32-4. Well, as a beginner's book, [it] isn't bad. I can't say that I agree with the author's tastes all the time, but he at least gives some good examples. Also there are some nice _Publish_-style makeovers. Don Hosek Book Design: A Practical Introduction, Douglas Martin, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York: 1989. 206pp. Along with Jan White's book (see below), this provides a fairly complete guide to book design. Martin's book is somewhat more conservative in outlook and also reflects his UK background. Don Hosek Digital Typography: An Introduction to Type and Composition for Computer System Design, Richard Rubinstein, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts: 1988. 340pp. An interesting, technological approach to typography which is worth reading although not necessarily always worth believing. A not insubstantial portion of the text is dedicated to representing type on a CRT display and Rubinstein devotes some time to expressing characteristics of typography numerically. Don Hosek Graphic Design for the Electronic Age, Jan V. White, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York: 1988. 212pp. A good handbook for document design. In a well-organized approach, White covers the principles for laying out most of the typographics features of a technical document. White is a bit overeager to embrace sans-serif types and in places his layout ideas seem a bit garish, but it's still a quite worthwhile book. Don Hosek Xerox Publishing Standards: A Manual of Style and Design, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York: 1988. 400pp. Overall, a disappointing book. It is divided into four sections of widely varying intent: "Publishing Process," "Document Organization," "Writing and Style" and "Visual Design." None of them is really adequate for the task and all are highly centered on the Xerox method for publishing. As a guide to Xerox' process, it succeeds, but as a manual for general use, it falls far short. In print. Don Hosek Methods of Book Design (3rd edition), Hugh Williamson, Yale University Press, New Haven: 1983. 408pp. It is a bit out-of-date as regards technology, but on issues relating purely to design it is comprehensive and definitive. Well, I suppose it could be argued that printing technology influences design - e.g. some types look fine in metal but lousy in digital imagesetting - and therefore a book that is out-of-date in technology can't really be "definitive" in matters of design either. In any event, _Methods_ is more than adequate for a beginner's needs. My paper-bound copy (ISBN 0-300-03035-5) was \$13.95; cheap at twice the price! Cameron Smith The Thames & Hudson Manual of typography, Rauri McLean, Thames & Hudson An excellent book if you start getting more interested in type. Look for Rauri McLean's other books after this one... Liam R.E. Quin Typography and Why it matters, Fernand Baudin. There is no better introduction than [it]. It's not a primer on subjects such as "what does Avant Garde look like," or "This is a good font for books." It is a good primer on the things you need to know before the rest should be considered. He's a lovely writer, to boot. [My copy is at work, so I may have munged the title-look up Baudin in "Books in Print" and improvise :-)] Ari Davidow Better Type, Betty Binns It's definitely not a lightweight beginner's introduction, but I've found [it] to be indispensable. It's a large-format hardcover, but you can find it remaindered for cheap if you look around. The book goes into great detail about how factors like line spacing, line length, point size, and design of typeface (evenness of stroke weight, x-height, etc.) affect readability. When you've gotten the basics out of the way and want to learn more about the fine nuances of type color, this book is an absolute must. David Mandl Printing Types: An Introduction..., S. Lawson, (revised) 1990 I'd also recommend Alexander S. Lawson's books especially /Printing Types: An Intro.../ (revised), 1990, which includes electronic types now. Bill Ricker Tally of Types, Stanley Morrison, Cambridge University Press. A keepsake for CUP on the Monotype fonts he'd acquired for them when he was Type Advisor to both Brit.Monotype & CUP (Cambridge University Press, Cambs.UK), which discusses his hindsight on some of the great revival fonts and some of the better new fonts. Bill Ricker Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago Press, 1982; ISBN 0-226-10390-0. The chapter on Design and Typography is most directly relevant, but there are a lot of hints scattered all through the Chicago Manual on making your words more readable and your pages more attractive. Stan Brown X Window System Administrator's Guide (O'Reilly X Window System Guides, volume 8), O'Reilly It gives advice about setting up fonts, etc. Liam Quin How Bodoni intended his types to look Bodoni, Giambattista. Fregi e Majuscole Incise e Fuse de ... Bodoni, Harvard University Library (repr). Inexpensive collectible, reproduced as a keepsake by the Houghton Library at Harvard. [wdr] The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst, Hartley & Marks 0-88179-033-8 pbk \$15, Z246.B74 1992 0-88179-110-5 cloth, \$25. A typography for desktop publishers who want to absorb some style. Informed by the historical european tradition and the desktop advertising, tempered by oriental yin-yang and examples. A page-turner with repeat-read depth. The only book I've seen that discusses page proportions that admits there are more than three ways that describes how to find one that feels good for your page. [wdr] Hermann Zapf on the cover-blurb: "All desktop typographers should study this book. ... I wish to see this book become the Typographers' Bible." Printing It, Clifford Burke, Ballantine, 0-345-02694-2. Manual for the hobby letterpress printer. [wdr] Twentieth Century Type Designers, Sebastian Carter, Taplinger, 1987. Discusses the talented adaptators of old faces to machine caster and film/laser, as well as the designers of new works. Indexed? [wdr] Design with Type, Carl Dair, University of Toronto Press, 0-8020-1426-7. In print again (or still?); the ISBN above may be stale. A great introduction to the issues of practicality and taste that confront the users of type. A prized possession. I only regret that the book does not include among the excerpts from his Westvaco pamphlets the Seven Don'ts of Typography. [wdr] Typography 6: The Annual of the Type Directors Club, Susan Davis, ed., Watson-Guptill, 0-8230-5540-x. Specimens of Type Faces in the U.S. G.P.O., John J. Deviny, director., US G.P.O. Practice of Typography: Plain Printing Types, Theodore Low De Vinne, Century Co./DeVinne Press. One of the earlier critical studies, in four volumes of which this is my personal favorite, and still a classic reference. If one wants to understand 18th and 19th century typography in context, this writer lived the transition from eclectic to standard sizes, and comments with taste. [wdr] An Essay on Typography, Eric Gill, Godine, 0-87923-762-7. The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering, Frederic W. Goudy, Dorset Press (Marboro Books), 0-88029-330-6 Lovely. A wonderful way to learn Goudy's taste. Stanley Morison Displayed, Herbert Jones, Frederick Muller Ltd / W, 0-584-10352-2. Lovely. A wonderful way to learn Morrison's taste. Printing Types: An Introduction..., Alexander S. Lawson et. al., Beacon 1971,?Godine? 1990; (2nd Ed includes electronic types now) "Good introduction to comparisons of typefaces, with a detailed history and a key family or face of each general category. Denounces rigid indexes of type faces." [wdr] Anatomy of a Typeface, Alexander Lawson, Godine, 0-87923-333-8, Z250.L34 1990 Deep description of the authors' favorite exemplar and its influences and relatives in each type category. It follows, without explicating, the category system developed in the prior book. [wdr] Types of Typefacs and how to recognize them, J. Ben Lieberman, Sterling, 1968 "This isn't very good really, but it does give lots of examples of the main categories." [Liam] [Old bibliographies praised this one, but I haven't seen it so I can't comment.- wdr] Tally of Types (& other titles), Stanley Morrison, Cambridge U. Press. A keepsake for CUP on the Monotype fonts he'd acquired for them when he was Type Advisor to both Brit. Monotype & CUP (Cambridge University Press, Cambs.UK), which discusses his hindsight on some of the great revival fonts and some of the better new fonts. [wdr] Rookledge's International Type Finder 2nd, Perfect, Christopher and Gordon Rookledge, Ed Moyer Bell Ltd / Rizzoli, 1-55921-052-4, Z250.P42 [1st Ed was NY: Beil 1983] "Lg. trade pb. Indexed by stylistic & characteristic features. Shows A-Z, a-z, 0-9 in primary figures, whether lining or ranging. Particularly distinctive sorts are marked for ease of comparison. Separate tables collect the distinctive characters for assistance in identifying a sample." [wdr] English Printers' Ornaments, Henry R. Plomer, Burt Franklin Paragraphs on Printing, Bruce Rogers, [Rudge] Dover, 0-486-23817-2 Digital Typography: An Introduction to Type and Composition for Computer System Design, Richard Rubinstein, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts: 1988. 340pp. For people who are disappointed with how the type looks on the laser, this book explains the subleties of that medium and of the screen that others miss. This is a study of the Human Factors of computer typographic systems. [wdr] The Case for Legibility, John Ryder, The Bodley Head, 0-370-30158-7, Z250.A4 The Solotype Catalog of 4,147 Display typefaces, Dan X. Solo, Dover, 0-486-27169-2, Z250.5.D57S654 19 "Working catalog of a specialty Graphics Arts shop. They use proprietary optical special effects techniques to get Desktop Publishing effects, and more, without the laser-printer grain. Great listing of 19th Century Decorated Types - probably the largest collection in the world. Prices to order headlines from them are NOT cheap however. Their services are for professional or serious hobby use only. Solo's previous Dover books show some number of complete alphabets of a general peculiar style; this one shows small fragments of his entire usable collection, important as an index. (According to private correspondence, they have more faces that have not yet been restored to usable condition.) Not well indexed, but indexed." [wdr] Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works, Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger., Adobe Press, 1993 Introductory, motivational. If you wonder why there are so many type faces in the world, this is the book for you! [Liam] [The title refers to the old joke: "A man who would letterspace lowercase would also steal sheep." [wdr]] The Art & Craft of Handmade Paper, Vance Studley, Dover, 0-486-26421-1, TS1109.S83 1990 Letters of Credit, Walter Tracey, Godine Press "I can't recommend this too highly. It's not as introductory as the Sheep Book, but conveys a feeling of love and respect for the letter forms, and covers a lot of ground very, very well." [Liam] Printing Types: Their History, Forms & Use, Daniel Berkely Updike, Harvard University Press, reprint by Dover. The standard reference. Tour-de-force history of type and type-styles. A trifle conservative in its biases, but typography is conservative for good reason: readability. Check the addenda for his final words on newer faces. [wdr] 1. I believe the Dover edition to be 3 vols Pbk; both the collectable and later Harvard U.P. editions were two vols hbk. 2. I am informed by my bookseller & Books In Print that the Dover edition is out of print. *sigh* If a source be known, let me know. Collectible HUP eds are not cheap, although later HUP eds may be had. Most libararies have later HUP or Dover eds. [wdr] Modern Encyclopedia of Typefaces, 1960-90, Lawrence W. Wallis, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 0-442-30809-4, Z250.W238 1990 "Gives examples of most typefaces, almost all digital, designed & distributed in the last 30 years. Cross indexed by foundry and designer, and sources and looks-likes. Some historical bits. Shows full a-z,A-Z,0-9, a few points (punctuation); and 0-9 again if both lining and oldstyle supplied. Only complaint is that it omits small caps even from what few fonts have 'em and the accented characters, of which most have some but too few. List \$25." [wdr] About Alphabets: Some Marginal Notes on Type Design, Hermann Zapf, MIT Press, 0-262-74003-6 Hermann Zapf & His Design Philosophy, Hermann Zapf, Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago "Anything about, by, or vaguely connected with Hermann Zapf is probably worth reading several times :-)" [Liam] Manuale Typographicum, Hermann Zapf, MIT Press, 0-262-74004-4 There are two books of this title (portrait and landscape); this is the only mass-market edition of either. Both are Zapf's selections of interesting typographical quotations in his inimitable display typography. [wdr] Microsoft Windows 3.1 Programmer's Reference, Microsoft Press. Documents the Panose system of typeface classification. Probably contains a general discussion of TrueType under MS Windows 3.1. Introduction to Typography, 3rd ed, Faber, London, 1962. A very good introduction for any beginner. Also discusses things like illustrations and cover design, although not in great detail. Simon was a purist, as the editor of the 3rd edition remarks. He did not mention phototypesetting in his original edition, but some observations on its uses and abuses have since been added. Anders Thulin Eve Damaziere contributes: Twentieth Century Type, Lewis Blackwell, Calmann & King, London (GB), 1992. Chez Flammarion (1993 - 256 p.) pour l'edition francaise (french edition). It's a very intelligent account of the history of type in our century, and its links to art, technics and politics (history). Lots of pictures, too. At the end of it, a "description and classification of types", from the 15th century up to now : the author follows the classification of Maximilien Vox (1952), a french graphist. [ed: additional bibliographic information appears in the file "Additional-bibliography" on http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/FAQ.html. I have not yet had time to integrate this bibliographic information into the FAQ] Subject: 1.19. Font Encoding Standards What is a character set? ======================== A character set is a collection of symbols in a specific order. Some common character sets are ASCII and ISO Latin 1. What is an encoding vector? =========================== The term "encoding vector" is most frequently heard in the context of PostScript fonts. An encoding vector embodies a particular character set, it is simply the list of all the characters in the character set in the order in which they occur. Most font technologies limit a particular encoding to 256 characters; an Adobe Type 1 font, for example, may contain an arbitrary number of characters, but no single encoding vector can contain more than 256. Some common encodings are: * Adobe Standard Encoding - the default encoding of many PS Type1 fonts * Apple Standard Encoding - the default encoding on a Mac * US ASCII - seven bit ASCII * ISO Latin-1 - an eight bit multi-national character set encoding * Cork Encoding - the TeX community's eight bit standard * FC - an eight bit encoding for African languages * TeX text - the TeX community's seven bit defacto standard (CMR) Where can I get them? ===================== You can get tables showing the layout of many standard character sets from the Kermit distribution (via anonymous ftp from watsun.cc.columbia.edu in /kermit/charsets. Subject: 1.20. PostScript What About PostScript UNIQUEIDs? ================================ This section was constructed from a posting by Johannes Schmidt-Fischer in Jun 1993. All PostScript Type 1 fonts should contain a UniqueId. This is a number which should be, as the name suggests, unique (at least among the fonts that you download to the printer at any given time). There are many PostScript fonts on the 'Net which have identical UniqeIds. If two of these fonts are downloaded to the same printer at the same time, attempts to use either font may cause the wrong characters to be printed. In a nutshell, the reason that the wrong characters may be printed is that the printer may be storing the rendered glyphs in its font cache, addressed by UniqueID. So, if two fonts, /Foo and /Bar, both have UniqueID=5 and /Foo's 10pt "A" is currently in the cache, a request for /Bar's 10pt "A" will cause the wrong character to be printed. Rather than rendering /Bar's "A" from its (correct and unambiguous) outline, the printer will note that the cache contains a 10pt "A" for font 5 and will copy it from the cache (resulting in /Foo's "A" printing for /Bar). Adobe's "Red Book" contains a detailed discussion of this topic. Can a Type 1 Font Be Shaded? ============================ David Lemon contributes: There are three ways to get grey into a font. The first is to make a series of Type 1 fonts, each of which will be used for a single shade of grey (or other color). The user then sets copies of the characters on top of each other, selecting each and setting it to the shade desired. It's a bit inconvenient (and won't work in a word processor) but it gets full resolution, good hinting and gives the user lots of control. This is the approach Adobe has used in its "chromatic" fonts (as in Adobe Wood Type 3 and Copal) and is viable for both Type 1 and TrueType formats. As an alternative, the designer can approximate shades of grey in the characters by using many little dots (a sort of halftone effect) or lines (as in cross-hatching). This leads to pretty complex characters, which may choke some rasterizers, and won't hint well. As with the first method, this is viable (more or less) for both Type 1 and TrueType. The third method is more direct but limited. In this approach, the designer/producer creates the shades of grey in a font-editing program. The limitation is that such a font must be written in Type 3, which is a generalized PostScript format (Type 1 and TrueType recognize only solid shapes). Such a font won't be supported by ATM, so your screen display will suffer and you'll be restricted to PostScript printers. On the plus side, your greys will be rendered at the full resolution of the printer you use. Subject: 1.21. TrueType George Moore announces the following information regarding TrueType fonts: "I am pleased to announce that there is now one central location for all official Microsoft TrueType information available on the Internet. The 9 files listed below are available for anonymous ftp access on ftp.microsoft.com in the /developr/drg/TrueType-Info directory. The most important of those files is the TrueType Font Files Specifications, a 400 page book which describes in excruciating detail how to build a TrueType font. Other information is also available in the same directory and other files will be added from time to time. For those people who do not have ftp access to the Internet can find the same information available for downloading on Compuserve in the Microsoft developer relations forum (GO MSDR) in the TrueType library. Please be aware that the TrueType specifications is