[HN Gopher] Adobe is dropping PostScript Type 1 font support
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Adobe is dropping PostScript Type 1 font support
Author : ingve
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-05-18 07:09 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macworld.com)
| murgindrag wrote:
| And this seems like yet another good reason to drop Adobe.
|
| I want things I author to be archival, not ephemeral.
|
| * Dropping Flash? Good idea. Dropping Flash with no
| compatibility/emulation path? Bad idea.
|
| * Switching to license servers from owning software? Bad idea.
|
| And so on. I like the things I do, and I like many of thing
| things I did 35 years ago too. I'd be sad to see them dead. At
| the end of the day, I'm willing to take a productivity hit to
| ensure that if I do create something really good, it's eternal.
|
| Even in retirement, someday, I won't expect to be able to afford
| the Adobe tax. Do I want my creative work disappearing? No.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I get your sentiment, but what Adobe does is of almost no
| consequence to the rest of the world. Type 1 fonts can never go
| away, and are required to be implemented in one form or
| another.
|
| For example, the actual outlines (once losslessly transformed
| into CFF/Type 2) are required to be supported by any OpenType-
| speaking rasterization engine _until the end of time_ ; this is
| as per ISO/IEC 14496-22 aka MPEG4 Part 22, a specification that
| is mostly Microsoft contributions, building on top of Apple's
| TrueType font specification (which was also adopted by
| Microsoft circa Windows 3.1). Adobe's only contribution to any
| of this was providing Type 1/Type 2 glyph support (which was
| already standardized as ISO 9541).
|
| Adobe's proposed replacement, which never was adopted, is Type
| 3: Type 1/2 fonts, but with the full power of Postscript to
| manage the actual rendering (as to do hand-tuned hinting, and
| such). This was designed to be a push into display-oriented
| fonts, instead of only having a font format that is optimal for
| print...
|
| Except TrueType hinting already has existed for 30 years, and
| hand-hinting is falling out of fashion as 200%+ DPI is becoming
| the norm. In the future, we're just going to go back to
| grayscale AA, no hand-hinting at 9-14px ranges, no subpixel
| rendering, and at this scale hinting at all has a negligible
| effect.
|
| Type 3 is not supported by OpenType's OTF or by WOFF, yet I can
| transform existing Type 1 formats (of which there are several)
| into OTF or WOFF, and continue using them with Freetype,
| DirectWrite, OSX's renderer, and in all major web browsers,
| with their glyphs exactly as intended by the original artist.
|
| People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author fonts. They
| are not the best in class, and also produce fonts that don't
| comply with the relevant specifications.
|
| People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author PDFs. They
| are not the best in class, and also produce PDFs that don't
| comply with the relevant specifications.
|
| I can repeat this statement for basically everything Adobe
| makes: of formats they invented, they don't comply with _their
| own specification_ while everyone else does, and there is a
| better domain-specific tool out there that replaces the use of
| them.
|
| The only counter-example in Adobe's entire portfolio is
| Photoshop: it's not great at every _specific_ use, but its the
| swiss army chainsaw of raster image manipulation; there 's
| _several_ better tools that do a specific task _much_ better,
| but nobody has been idiotic enough to produce a tool that does
| all of them mediocrely at the same time.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Can Animate not open Flash files?
| tjohns wrote:
| There are certain file formats that are explicitly designed to
| be archival safe, like PDF/A. For long term stability, I always
| try to export a copy to one of those.
|
| File formats like .doc or .psd that are tied to evolving
| product lines are bound to change eventually. They're great for
| working copies, but I don't expect those file formats to still
| be readable in 10-20 years. Unless the file format explicitly
| calls out long-term archival as a feature, I assume a PM will
| eventually change the file format and break things.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| it's not like there aren't a million tools to read postscript
| type 1 fonts. I think your documents are probably safe
| Someone wrote:
| Having software that can interpret type 1 fonts doesn't help
| in getting Photoshop to keep reading those fonts.
| orionblastar wrote:
| I remember Adobe Type Manager for Windows 3.1, how far things
| have come.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| Do they not understand that designers, and especially publishers,
| have projects that go on and need to still be editable for years
| and years? I have dozens of books on backlist from past decades
| with type 1 fonts. Some day I might want to do another printing
| run, in which case I need to be able to open them and edit the
| copyright page and fix typos and so on. Preferably when I do this
| I don't discover that the whole thing needs to be retypeset.
| Graphic designers must exist in the same position.
|
| Thank God we use TeX/groff and not InDesign.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > we use TeX/groff and not InDesign.
|
| Surely that _is_ a takeaway here: Open standards, open formats,
| open source. And maybe "not Adobe" for good measure;) Nobody
| ever will - or _can_ truly kill groff support for something;
| even if it were removed from the (many) implementations, you
| can just build an old checkout and be back in business.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Nice shout out for Albertus there. This is a typeface I recommend
| reserving for use as an occasional decorative font, especially
| for map titles, or for signage. The utility is social, being a
| signal to others, in particular a secret order of iconoclasts
| possessing great taste in mid-century British avant-garde
| allegorical television; they will respond in kind, and these are
| people you can trust.
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