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Happy with open type
Though my use of fonts and font families is
limited to in-house manuals, technical
documentation and the like, I strongly
approve of the Adobe/Microsoft move
towards Open Type, and would encourage other
software graphics programmers to adopt the
technology. There is nothing more
frustrating than to have to manually create
ligature styles, or to search for a
complementary-but-not-identical symbol or
special character which is necessary for the
current project but not included in the
current font set.
As Mr. Berry notes, taking care benefits
the reader. I've always held that when I'm
trying to get one last thing as right as
possible, I'm not doing it for those who
WON'T notice. It seems to me that Open
Type is a step in the direction of
providing an appropriate document -- book,
memo, manual or on-line web page -- not
for those who won't notice, but for those
who will.
After some delay, OpenType is becoming a nice reallity
OpenType is a much better way to handle special and language-specific characters than these expert collections. I did a similar job and OT fonts helped me so much on this. I love to have automactic options to change oldstyle/lining numerals or swash initials/endings.
It's really suprising there is no others apps with OT support by now. Just InDesign and, in a minor scale, Photoshop. Even Illustrator 10 don't know what OT fonts are, a real failure for Adobe. But I'm sure this will change in 1-2 years.
Besides this, the Adobe-ego-trip question makes no sense since the article is about a format developed by Adobe and MS. If someone try the new TT Microsoft fonts, will see they are actually OT fonts with Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew characters. It's not an Adobe exclusivity, of course.
The problem is not Adobe but the other software producers: why not to adopt OpenType? Translators and DTP professionals will be happy to have OT features in Word, XPress and even CorelDraw. But just Adobe give us some solution until these days.
For the reader who asked about the precision gave by MM fonts, the solution is just one by now: to build your own OT version with FontLab 4.0, the only font editor available that handles OT format. Not an easy way.
Puh-leeze Yourself!
You know, if this site was nothing more than an Adobe ego trip, then I wonder why we've posted glowing reviews of Flash MX and are running weekly tips on QuarkXPress. I don't disagree that we do post a lot of information about Adobe products -- they are the biggest player in this market, after all. But at least give us credit for covering other products, because we do.
Also, John is writing about OpenType which was co-developed with Microsoft. In this case, InDesign is only a vehicle for the fonts.
Thanks,
Pamela Pfiffner, eic
Use caution...
In the review of Opentype, the author wrote "...Not only am I using OpenType fonts, but I made the decision to switch to the OpenType version of the typeface in the middle of production..."
As a Production Manager, I cringe when I hear things like this. I hope that the author has fully researched the ability of his prepress vendor to handle OpenType with their system. I have recently run into some issues with AGFA workflow systems in place that do not currently support OpenType.
Pipe Dreams
It's apparent that almost every article published here lately, including Berry's stuff, is an ego trip written on Adobe's behalf. I can only guess why that is, but it's none of my business. However, this Open Type affair seems to me as yet another pipe dream that is unlikely, untimely, and ignorant of how market share is divided among DTP applications. InDesign has yet to break 3% of market share, while Xpress is very nicely covering about 90%. Xpress does not support Open Type, nor has it any reason to do so. The majority of designers - those who are Macintosh-based - may remember something called GX, not at all unlike Open Type - much better in fact - which was another pipe dream that went the way of the lemming.
And puh-LEEZ!! MinionMM didn't magically transform itself into a better typeface in Minion Pro. With MinionMM I can choose a weight that is exactly 4 units thinner or heavier than Minion Bold. How do you propose I go about doing that with Minion Pro?