Does this operate on a Macintosh with fonts created in FL Fontographer

NewType is Apple's way to point the finger to Adobe and Microsoft. Its every OpenType is and a whole lot font, with an intuitive font editor called Apple Fontographer Plus.

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NewType is Apple's way to point the finger to Adobe and Microsoft. Its everything OpenType is today, and a whole lot more.

Just imagine, an intuitive font editor called Apple Fontographer Plus. And a powerful new typeface programming language called: NewType.
which is really just TrueType, with a croos platform file format, complex tables headers like OpenType, a built-in library of glyph parts, a system of overlapping elements that references that library (like TrueType 3 should have been, if it ever came out, but Adobe joined up with MicroSoft to make OpenType to get even with Apple for burying Type 1 - don't you recall that Type 1 was locked and only junky Type 3 was available to the common man, until the release of TrueType forced John Warnock's hand to publish Adobe's Type 1 spec in for the masses in futile desperation [sorry, too little, too late, John.])

Thomas Phinney,

Could email me your email address, or your email address at Adobe, and phone number, too?

When I visited San Francisco in 1989/90 at the first annual USA/USSR Developers Conference sponsored by Apple and MacWorld, my brother and I stayed at Marriot Residence between Palo Alto and Cupertino. It was nice to shop there in outdoor malls.

Adobe was in Palo Alto, had two buildings, and moved later to San Jose because Steve Jobs' socks stunk (nothing personal, Steve, but you jogged a lot in your thirties, and mumurred under your breath that you'll that you'll teach that guy a thing or two one day {I think you were at Next or Pixal (sp)}). We didn't meet Robert Slimbach either - maybe he wasn't there yet. But John Warnock walked from one building to the other (he couldn't afford in those days, poor John). We looked at each other eye to eye; two bearded people do that, you know. I thought: "Hey, thats Jon Warnock." He likely thought: "Hey, what that bearded ultra-Orthodox doing here; he should in San Francisco or Southern California, but in Silicon Valley."

John was right. I couldn't some kosher steaks, nowhere nearby, and I was hungry! So, my brother and drove down to San Jose where they had a budding Orthodox community in the either very late eighties, or very early nineties.

Aldus was PageMaker and Freehand, purchased from the Texas makers of Fontographer, and Macromedia was growing into a giant, just like Adobe.

But Adobe grew much bigger and gobbled up Macromedia, after it gobbled up Aldus (what am I gonna do with Freehand?, Adobe execs thought, which was sold to Macromedia before they gobbled up Macromedia (what are we gonna do with Freehand and Fontographer now, Adobe execs thought - so they sold Fontographer to FontLab and killed poor little Freehand - why Adobe didn't turn Macromedia Fontographer into Adobe Fontographer (Freehand was a character window from Fontographer with sophicated color model editing feature that were easy to use, unlike Illustrator - but poor Freehand, may it rest in peace, tear, tear)with advanced OpenType editing, really cool hinting tools, Unicode 5 support just like FontLab, and flush FontLab the toilet and that whole for itself? I just know understand it. I mean, how stupid can you get. Adobe, why don't just buy FontLab and Fontographer before Apple buys them and comes out with Apple NewType!!

NewType is Apple's way to point the finger to Adobe and Microsoft. Its every OpenType is and a whole lot font, with an intuitive font editor called Apple Fontographer Plus. First it was the iMac. Then, it was the Intel processor. Afterwards, it was (will be) NewType(tradebook). Then, its Steve Job's bombshell. System 11. Faster than a speeding bullet.

Clark Kent, I mean, Bill Gates won't know hit it. I'm ruined. Multi-taking triple-processor compatible operating system which makes a Cray computer look stupid. Forget it, I'm retiring, say Bill. Steve won. Adobe, if you don't Fontographer and bury FontLab, Apple will gobble you up! Do you know what that means? You move back all the way to Cupertino, Apple buys up more real estate in Palo Alto and remames it Cupertino II. The prices of houses there sky-rocket. And you hope to tranfered to North Cupertino, located in what was Seatle.

Thomas,

Can you email me at go.hebrew@gmail.com about your past identity before Adobe?

I will review both links from your last post.

Who at Adobe was responsible and understand very very well the technology called "Content Server" or locking/unlocking PDFs or eBooks, no longer marketed by Adobe?

Scott

What is the practical advantage of CFF besides permitting the Type 1 format to be easily converted to OpenType? Besides that, is this any practical advantage?

Thomas,

When I visited Adobe then in San Jose in 1989 or 19990, I don't think you were there. I don't know your name from that period of time. I don't have your resume to see where you were a few years later. But I do know your name, and associate it with quality font development.

I was briefly on Compuserve communicating with some people; I was on AppleLink at the time, which AOL's version for Apple. It basically was AOL ease combined with Compuserve's advantages, with an easy way to email to Apple engineers, technicians, who responded to suggestions faster than the speed of light. Today, these people do not interact with common man. Hence, Apple - although it is huge - remains a dwarf even though it has no real competition in creativity with the exception of Adobe, which Apple created.

This is an example of a son who becomes greater than his father. Adobe does better business than Apple. Soon, Adobe will even overtake MicroSoft, and everyone will smile.

Its my Sabbath soon. Let me review your links and post a response on Sunday or Monday.

Replies here to both Scott and "Go Hebrew":

Scott, I can't tell you where you know my name from. But your name is familiar as well, and I think from a really long time ago. Maybe you were active in the CompuServe DTP Forums back in the early to mid 90s?

I'm not sure I would call myself a professional type designer, as that implies that it's a full time job, whereas type design as such is not part of my job description as product manager for fonts and global typography at Adobe. But I have shipped a pretty large typeface (Hypatia Sans: ).

For more about me see:

"Go hebrew":

Each tool has its limitations today. I think many people have both in their toolset, and others pick one based on their particular needs.

FontLab is the only one of the three to be a full-featured font creation environment. If you use the FDK or VOLT you'll still need to use something else to create the initial font, which could be FontLab or something else.

The current versions of FontLab and the FDK do not support mark attachment and several other lookup types required for making fonts for "complex scripts" such as Arabic and the Indic languages. They also don't do complex interleaving of lookups as well as VOLT. The text-based feature coding language is not hard to learn, but it's not visual nor as easy as VOLT. The FDK proper is a whole suite of tools and scripts, many of which are useful even if one is using FontLab or VOLT to do one's OpenType layout feature creation.

VOLT doesn't work easily with OpenType CFF, only OpenType TrueType. Plus, it's an outboard tool and not directly integrated with any font editor. But it is very visual and really easy to use, and it has all the functionality needed to do the complex script languages.

The integration with FontLab makes the FDK code as used within FontLab the most popular choice by far, for most users. We hope to update the stand-alone FDK within the next year (hopefully on the sooner end of that) to provide the remaining OpenType layout feature functionality that is currently missing for complex scripts; that would then get integrated by FontLab at some later date.

Regards,

T

Does FontLab or the FDK only support very limited OpenType features, not very sophisticated OpenType table generation like MicroSoft VOLT?

Or is FontLab and/or Adobe's FDK comparable in their feature sets to MS VOLT, just having user different interfaces?

First and foremost, thank you for your post.

Second, where do I know your name from? You are a professional type designer, highly respected, talented "real-pro", as they say, Tom (perhaps you're only Thomas).

I am also a humble professional type designer, proficient in excellent type design only (no low end knock-offs) but I specialize in non-Roman languages, such as Arabic Hebrew Greek and Russian among many different languages, except Oriental.

Your sentence about FontLab seems to suggest that FL is prefered over FDK. From you, that says a lot. And its say that in comparison to MS Volt neither performs the creation of certain layout tables that are needed for the correct positioning of multiple glyph overlays or overstrikes (i.e. zero width characters). If so, why use FDK if you use Volt?

You don't need to run Unix to run the FDK, just use .pfb or .pfa font files as input.

However, for most users, a retail program such as FontLab will be much easier to work with than the FDK.

Regards,

T

Thank you for your response. I have both computers for Macintosh or Windows. I don't have UNIX computer, but if I needed I could UNIX under Windows in a program called Virtual PC bought by Microsoft (but rendered obsolete on the Macintosh with the recent Intel chip-based Macs). I recall Fog could output everything desired as you describe but not OpenType, and does not have recent Unicode values in its internal database.