Thierry Bouche on the future of OpenType.


>    CID fonts killed Composite Fonts, (See Adobe Tech Note 5092, Section
>    2, page 6)
> 
>    Open Type Fonts are going to kill CID fonts,

yes

>    Open Type Fonts are going to kill Multiple Master Fonts, (See Minion
>    Pro Opticals already available from Adobe in Open Type format)

no : Opticals OTF give you the equivalent of some masters with few
design sizes, it doesn't allow to interpolate between the masters,
although someone pointed out that this may be doable some features on
the mac (aui, if memory serves). If you have a corporate font that was
defined as a certain instance of Minion, and you want to enjoy the
opentype features, or even only the new released glyphs (greek, e.g.),
you're facing a problem without solution.

>    Type 1 and TrueType will go on for ever.

not sure. Adobe said they won't ship new T1 fonts anymore. In some
sense T1 development is dead, as MM. But, most apps have no support at
all for OTF: what can you do with an OTF in win2k outside inDesign?
open the charmap, and paste the glyphs you want into your app, which
is not even possible with linotype palatino because the interesting
glyphs are not encoded. Moreover, adobe made a bizarre marketing
decision at some point, that their library would be converted as OTF
(this only concerns adobe originals, as of now), and that licensed
users of T1 fonts would have to upgrade (not free). Considering that
most users are happy with the glyph set they currently own, giving
them the choice between paying for few additional (& maybe useless)
glyphs, some interesting but mostly unsupported features, or keeping
their current working environment... I don't see T1 vanishing
shortly... the fact that someone developed a tool that takes an OTF
font and breaks it into 8bits parts (to be able to use them in an
adobe app!) is interesting...

If someone released a cheap or free tool that would take a T1 family
and assemble an OTF one with all the standard features that could be
guessed from the glyph names (such as ff ligs, alternates, small
caps), and if major applications such as XPress, Frame, Pagemaker,
Word... provided the interface to these features, then, yes, T1 fonts
would disappear hastily.


-- 
Thierry Bouche