A History of TrueType Fonts
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Back in the late 1980s, it was clear to most of the major players in the personal computer world that scalable font technology was going to be an important part of future operating systems. Adobe was trying to get Apple and Microsoft to license its PostScript code for this purpose. This solution (which became Display PostScript) had the right features, but both companies were naturally concerned about handing control over key parts of their operating systems - not to mention millions of royalty dollars - to Adobe. (DPS was too slow for the target machines anyway, ending up only on Steve Jobs' NeXT computer.) Also, Apple was irritated that Adobe licensed PostScript to printer manufacturers who undercut Apple's own LaserWriter. So, Apple and Microsoft agreed a cross-licensing and product development deal, the fruits of which would be available to both parties: Microsoft would bring a PostScript-style graphics engine to the table (TrueImage), while Apple would create a font system even better than Adobe's... Nothing ever came of TrueImage. It was buggy when delivered, and Microsoft and Apple realized they didn't much need it anyway. (It's clear to see who got the better deal out of the arrangement!) Application developers want to do things their own ways, not get locked into writing clones of Adobe Illustrator. [Years later, Apple (whose customers are most demanding that graphics be handled effectively) released a system much better suited to interactive graphics and typography: QuickDraw GX. But application developers have been slow to use its amazing features - perhaps because if they do and their product is a success, everyone else will copy them immediately.] Adobe took the loss very seriously. It had failed in its bid for total control over PC font technology. Its response was twofold. In mid-1989, when they learned that Apple would not be requiring its technology, they announced a program, Adobe Type Manager, before it had even been written. About a year later, you could buy ATM to display Adobe Type 1 fonts on the Macintosh, without any help from Apple. ATM was sold cheaply, or was bundled with fonts bought from Adobe. The second bold move was to publish the Type 1 font specification. (Previously font foundries had to pay Adobe royalties to create Type 1 fonts. The font data was encrypted, and it was not possible to retrieve the control points - except deep inside an Adobe PostScript engine. But now anyone could write a Type 1 font editor.) In fact Adobe had this move forced upon them, since the TrueType specification had been made public, and because Bitstream cracked the Type 1 format anyway. Bitstream soon released hundreds of Type 1 fonts and a fast ATM clone, FaceLift. Apple had been developing what was to become TrueType from late 1987. At that time there were many competing font scaling technologies, and several would have been suitable for the Macintosh. It was by no means certain, according to lead engineer Sampo Kaasila, that Apple would adopt TrueType. In the end though, it proved itself on performance and rendering quality (at high and low resolution) against the others. Kaasila completed his work on TrueType, though it didn't yet have that name, in August 1989. The following month Apple and Microsoft announced their strategic alliance against Adobe, where Apple would do the font system, Microsoft the printing engine. Apple released TrueType to the world in March 1991 - the core engine in much the same form that Kaasila left it back in 1989. This first customer version was an 80K add-on to System 6.0, available until recently on the Apple website! The system needed fonts of course, and the first TrueType fonts - Times Roman, Helvetica and Courier - were great examples of what could be done with the technology. TrueType has been built into the Mac operating system ever since. Microsoft introduced TrueType into Windows with version 3.1 in early 1992. Working with Monotype, they had created the superb core set of fonts - TrueType versions of Times New Roman, Arial and Courier. These fonts showed, just as Apple's TrueTypes had, that scalable fonts could generate bitmaps virtually as though each size had been designed by hand. With non-fancy fonts, the system generally worked well. However, since Windows 3.1 had to run on machines with slow 16-bit 286 processors, the TrueType system had to be reconfigured as a 16-bit implementation of Kaasila's fundamentally 32-bit architecture. (While a 32-bit simulation would have worked, some thought that would have been too slow on these base machines.) Memory allocation worked only "most of the time". At large sizes, the whole system would became less precise, although that wasn't the worst thing. In some fonts that were made faithfully to the specification, complex characters would sometimes fail to display at all, or they'd appear on screen but not on the printer, mystifying and infuriating font users the world over. Things were bad for the font developer too. Complex glyphs had to be simplified. Hinting code had to work around the 16-bit limitations. Fonts that worked fine on the Mac, developed with the TrueType hinting tools (all Mac programs, mostly written by Kaasila), would fail in Windows. TrueType hinting was hard enough already without this to contend with, and several font foundries abandoned earlier commitments to release their type libraries in TrueType format. (Even now, type foundries have many typefaces just waiting for a big customer to say "I'll have 10,000 licenses please" to justify the man-years of TrueType engineering.) So it was that the main type foundries left the huge market for TrueType fonts on Windows wide open. The market was soon flooded with cheap fonts scanned or stealthily converted from other people's work - mainly bug-ridden fonts of dubious ethical quality, with wobbly outlines and useless hinting. The perceived quality of TrueType as a whole suffered from these abominations, at least on the Windows platform, and for years TrueType itself was much maligned by type professionals. Only in August 1995, with the release of Windows 95, did Microsoft's TrueType engine become 32-bit, complete and reliable. Indeed, it now features greyscale rasterization (anti-aliasing), enhancing on-screen text substantially. Microsoft have commissioned some superb new TrueType fonts that they give out free on their website. The rehabilitation of TrueType is well underway. by Laurence Penney |
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