On May 13, 2013, at 6:43 PM, Ian Joyner <ianjoy...@me.com> wrote: > Yes there is now a confusion of very similar fonts. Many were done by > Microsoft with tweaks to original fonts made to make them look 'good' (in > someone's opinion, or was it just marketing) on the computer screens of the > 1990s.
Most of what you say in this email is simply not true. (Watch out, I worked in font technology in the late ‘80s through 1990, and have kept tabs on it since.) The initial fonts in Windows were existing ones licensed from Bitstream, including Arial (which is indeed a legal knockoff of Helvetica; for some weird reason typeface designs are not protected by copyright law.) I’m not sure why they went with these instead of getting the originals from Linotype the way Adobe did; cost was probably a factor, also Bitstream had a lot of font technology that Microsoft would have needed at the time. > This shows the MS philosophy of bending the natural world to suit their > technology, not improving technology to suit the world. So they designed > fonts to look good on crappy screens. Apple on the other hand came along and > said "we like these beautiful fonts, we don't want to change them, so let's > make the screens better”. Um, no. Everyone worked on adjusting fonts to crappy screens and low-resolution printers. “Hinting” was one of the hardest parts of font technology; Adobe tried to keep their algorithms in PostScript proprietary, forcing people to buy very expensive licenses, until Apple did an end-run around it by developing TrueType which had its own hinting scheme. In the 1990s you simply could not get away with rendering unhinted fonts, because most people’s displays didn’t support enough color depth to use antialiasing. OS X 10.0 made a break with the past by requiring 16-bit or higher color depth, in part because that was necessary for good antialiased text. Another factor that allowed good-looking antialiased unhinted text was sub-pixel antialiasing, aka ClearType, invented by … Microsoft. > Another reason MS designed all these wacky fonts was licence fees. While > bleating on about people stealing software with copies and depriving them of > fees, they copied fonts, subtly changing a few pixels and the name to avoid > licence fees. Bitstream did that, not Microsoft, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They’re far from the only ones who did: other big vendors like Compugraphic made knock-off fonts too, and it goes on today — any of those CD-ROMs with zillions of cheap fonts are loaded with badly-drawn imitations of famous designs. Microsoft has since developed/published a lot of original high-quality fonts including Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet, Calibri, etc. Most of these were designed by very competent highly-regarded type designers like Matthew Carter. Yes, they were designed to look good on low-resolution computer screens with hinting. There’s nothing wrong with that — type has always been designed around the limitations of printing/display technology. Newspaper fonts like Times Roman are specially tweaked to be legible at small sizes on crappy newsprint. Older fonts had tweaks like “ink traps” to work around the way that ink smears around the edge of the glyph during printing. Georgia and Verdana were indispensable in the ‘90s for onscreen use. I am no fan of Microsoft overall, but they’ve made a lot of contributions to digital typography in the past 20 years, and they’ve been generous in making a lot of the fonts they sponsored available for free on all platforms. > Arial it should be noted is just Helvetica, but you will notice some of the > tops of letters are sloped instead of straight, actually making Arial less > readable. Arial is now everywhere, it's a horrible font: Arial is indeed bad, but there are a lot worse. I’m not especially worked up about it (partly because I’ve never been fond of Helvetica either.) —Jens
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