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Font of knowledge: Left, Adobe's OpenType format combines the multitude of font files from both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Right, an OpenType font contains many components; to achieve results similar to OpenType using the traditional Macintosh system, a user would need three or four different font suitcases and a similar number of font outline files.
Cross-platform font rendering
is hell, but now there's hope
It is axiomatic that if the art department wants to use Macs, reporters want to use Windows. Or, if everyone in editorial wants to use Macs, then the ad department wants to use PCs.
One major alternative weekly had its editorial department computerize early on using Windows machines; when the ad department got around to going away from pasteup, it chose Macs.
Regardless which platform you like, in an increasingly cross-platform world, the handling of typefaces has become a widespread problem in the publishing and graphic arts industries.
Despite the fact that a typeface may have the same name and come from the same company, it often reproduces differently on a PC and a Mac. Stories or ads composed on a Mac usually can't be output via a PC, or vice versa.
As a result, publishers and graphic arts shops have had to standardize on one system -- either all Mac or all PC -- or suffer the consequences of cross-platform fonts.
One of the first indications of this cross-platform typographical problem surfaced when Quark Inc. of Denver released Quark XPress for Windows to match its long-standing Quark XPress for Macintosh. Though the two applications are compatible across platforms -- in theory, pages developed on a Mac can be handled on a PC and the other way around, too -- identical versions of the fonts must be used on both systems to ensure accurate handling of text. And even then it doesn't always work.
A font's specific metrics designate the character spacing and size even though the metrics may be different between various versions of a font and between the same version of a font on different platforms. As a result, documents must be checked carefully before outputting them on a platform other than the one on which they were created.
"The biggest technical problem we have encountered is with fonts because of the metrics of cross-platform typography," said Glen Turpin, corporate communications manager for Quark. "For example, the standard Mac font of Helvetica and a Windows Helvetica font may have slightly different measurements, which is a problem."
Turpin said XPress has the same typographical features in both versions, so that files can be transferred from a PC to a Mac. "This offers the best solution," he said, "because if the font is identical, the layout will appear identical as well."
Many difficulties have been discovered in the publishing industry as Mac and PC users work on the same document. Sometimes if a Mac user deletes a portion of the document and the PC user opens it, the deleted item may still appear.
"We don't offer a solution to the font problem because we don't develop fonts," Turpin said. "We support our customer needs by trying to offer tools in the workflow process. The biggest problem we have seen has been in the metrics of the fonts because there is a problem with the availability and consistency of transferring files."
Byting off a font library
Font characters have traditionally been encoded in an eight-bit unit of data -- the byte.
This means that characters can only be assigned a numeric value between 0 and 255 -- which limits the number of characters in a font to 256. Windows versions through Windows 98 use a character set developed by Microsoft Corp., while the Mac uses a character set developed by Apple Computer Inc.
The first 128 characters in both sets include the alphabet, numbers, punctuation and control codes. They conform to the same American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) set, so there is no problem translating those characters between platforms.
But different platforms use, for example, different control characters to indicate the end of a line. UNIX uses the new-line character. Mac OS uses the carriage return character. DOS uses both.
This one little difference has caused numerous problems in automated text processing. If the software is unable to detect the difference between the two operating systems, a Mac text file may appear as one very long line on a DOS system.
Making matters worse, there came to be two basic font rendering technologies, Adobe Type 1 and TrueType.
For those outputting work through PostScript printers -- publishers and graphic artists -- Type 1 fonts were preferred, as results were consistent. This came from the fact that PostScript and Type 1 were both developed by Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose.
TrueType, ironically, was an Apple technology that it traded to Microsoft during a period when relations between Apple and Adobe were chilly in the early 1990s. (In a further irony, the TrueImage printer technology that Microsoft gave in return for TrueType never worked.)
Because of the large installed base of Windows 3.21 machines -- and a relatively easy-to-use font development environment -- TrueType fonts flooded the market. Unfortunately, while these fonts worked well in bit-mapped environments -- like on dot-matrix printers or on a monitor screen -- they didn't work well in the PostScript environment.
Any characters above the basic 128 ASCII character set are assigned different values on each platform, and many characters in the extended set of various fonts are only available on one platform. Soon the "font wars" between TrueType and Type 1 became a living cross-platform hell.
"Not all characters appear the same because they are different," said David Gray, executive director of the Society for News Design, based in Providence, R.I. When a user sends a file from one platform to the other and then back again, Gray said, "weird things" happen.
"For instance," said Gray, "I recently encountered a problem with a Quark file that was originally created on a Mac. We sent it to a PC and then back to a Mac. Once we did that, we couldn't open it again."
The longtime newspaper design executive said, "A lot of these companies say their software is cross-platform, but it really isn't. Newspapers have encountered the biggest issue with front-end pagination systems. It's not easy to add all the fonts they need by using just one system."
While some packages are able to convert TrueType and Type 1 fonts for use on a different platform, they may not always produce accurate results.
The simplest way to avoid these issues, obviously, is to designate fonts commonly found on both platforms or at least try to utilize a similar typeface common to the opposite platform.
"We have encountered so many problems with fonts because there are new fonts that are designed to work on both platforms that just don't," said Carol Howard, director of computer service for The Oregonian in Portland. "We have chosen Quark [XPress] on a Mac for the designing of the page. When we try to edit a story in Quark, the fonts are different on a PC than they are on a Mac."
Howard said that all of the paper's headlines are now fixed on a Mac before moving to the PC XPress version. "We have some Mac fonts that have a different baseline, but it doesn't matter with the smaller size because the distance doesn't show."
Oregonian editors originally chose non-Adobe fonts that didn't have cross-platform typography because they liked their appearance. At the time, they were not aware of the cross-platform issues. "It was only later that we began losing files across platforms," said Howard.
Adobe introduces OpenType
Wading into this latest skirmish of the font wars is Adobe, the 20-year digital font development veteran, which has now developed the OpenType format.
OpenType allows the same font file to work on both Macs and Windows computers while also supporting a widely expanded character set and layout features.
"Our applications work on both platforms so there aren't any issues with line breaks or page breaks," said Harold Grey, group product manager for Adobe. "It has been a real challenge for us because there have been so many issues that we have encountered. On a Mac, there are two font files, printer and screen suitcase, while on the PC, it is .pfb [font outline] and .pfm [font metric] files.
"There are two sets of data on different platforms," said Grey. "Newspapers have writers working on Windows machines while others are doing the layout on a Mac."
Adobe has discovered a way to reference character shapes cross-platform, he said. In 1996, Microsoft and Adobe came together to develop OpenType to help solve the cross-platform system issues by using the same font data and a standard method for encoding. OpenType fonts are drawn from either a TrueType font or a Type 1 font, and can be used simultaneously with either of those formats.
OpenType fonts are based on Unicode, the international two-byte character encoding that permits an expanded character set with more layout features and more precise typographic control.
"With OpenType, we have released 250 compatible fonts now and will be converting our entire Adobe library by 2002," Grey said.
He said Adobe has been working with "several major newspapers" on this because it solves a big problem when a publication is using a variety of computer platforms.
"Newspapers can't have some text deleted when a file is transferred," Grey said, "because it is the most demanding publishing environment."
Editorial isn't the only place where cross-platform fonts have caused problems.
"We have resolved most of our problems by requiring ads to be produced in a PDF file, which has fonts embedded so they stay the same from one machine to the other," said Paul SoRelle, manager of pre-press systems for the Houston Chronicle, referring to the Portable Document Format, another Adobe innovation.
"We don't see any problems if the PDF file is produced properly," SoRelle said, noting that it is important to have a common set of fonts.
"We don't have any immediate plans to use OpenType but we are looking into it," said SoRelle. "The most important thing for us is to get people to adhere to a properly formatted PDF file to ensure accuracy."
Since OpenType is based on the two-byte Unicode system, an OpenType typeface can have as many as 65,000 characters in one font. So OpenType has extended character sets -- including characters such as true small caps, old-style figures, fractions, swashes (elaborate italics used for initials and headings), superiors, inferiors, titling letters and a full range of ligatures -- that allow designers access to characters that are essential for effective typographic communication, but which were not easily available to users with previous formats.
Before OpenType, small caps or old-style numerals had to be accessed by selecting a separate font -- usually called an "expert" font -- that supported those specific characters.
One of the ways that OpenType can extend itself typographically is the distinction between the "character" and the "glyph." For every character there is a default glyph -- the specific form of a character. For example, the letter "a" would have the default glyph of the lowercase "a," and optional glyphs of the small cap "a" and an alternate swash lowercase "a"; all are the character "a," but they are three different glyphs.
One glyph can also represent multiple characters, as in the case of ligatures -- the þ ligature is one glyph incorporating the two characters "f" and "l."
Further, OpenType supports virtually all the world's languages, allowing for easy multilingual publishing.
Lastly, OpenType supports the concept of different designs for different point-size renderings. Some of the fonts that Adobe has converted to the OpenType format include four optical size variations: caption, regular, subhead and display.
These variations translate to different sizes in different font families, but generally caption is six points to eight points, regular is nine points to 13 points, subhead is 14 points to 24 points, and display is anything over 25 points.
By having all these features available in one typeface, font management and overall workflow are simplified.
The only hitch in OpenType is that the only application that currently supports it is Adobe's own InDesign page layout application (see previous story), which will run on three platforms in the version to be released early next year: Windows, Classic Mac and Mac OS X.
Adobe says that it will extend support for OpenType to its other applications as well. It's an open question whether other software publishers will support the standard, but since it was co-developed with Microsoft and is an integral part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, cross-platform font problems may soon go away.
-- Kellie K. Speed, kkspeed@colepapers.net
Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-4281.
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