Ananda Das tells the type 3 story: Type 3 is an almost-obsolete format once very popular because it was the only way for non-Adobe folks to produce PostScript fonts in the old days. The font technology was generally considered inferior because it did not allow hinting to make the fonts reproduce well on 300-dpi laser printers, although they generally were fine on filmsetters. Adobe kept the proprietary secret of how to make Type 1 fonts to themselves, so that they could sell the best-looking fonts. This, together with Adobe's then-high royalties for PostScript itself, annoyed Apple and Microsoft, so they developed TrueType as an alternative to PostScript. Learning of this development, Adobe's John Warnock publicly released the Type 1 spec so that anyone could make such a font. Thereafter, almost no Type 3 fonts were ever made. But Type 3 fonts did have some capabilities of their own, not shared with Type 1 fonts. They allowed shading and textures, as well as "random" substitution of particular glyphs, as Alan rightly pointed out. If you want to see some Type 3 fonts, they are probably still widely available at FTP freeware/shareware sites, usually under "PostScript" headings, sometimes under "PostScript Type 3".

EXTERNAL LINKS
Google search page

INTERNAL LINKS
Type 1 font software ⦿ Type 3 Font Software ⦿ Randomized fonts ⦿ Textured typefaces ⦿

Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html