Rant January 30, 2002 Enough is enough

.....

¶ I am soooooooo tired of corporate tactics in the name of the almighty dollar. After having listened to too many spiels about the "new" font format, OpenType, I can't sit still any longer. So here is my rant about yet another "technology" that they are trying to shove down our throats. The players are Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft gots lots of mileage out of Truetype, the native type format for Windows, and Adobe brought the world the type 1 and type 3 font formats. So they have combined forces several years ago, and are, together, trying to bring us OpenType, a font format born out of corporate scheming, contempt for the consumers, and inacceptable compromises.

The formats

¶ Clearly, Microsoft wanted OpenType to generalize TrueType, so that any software would be backward compatible. Thus, it is no surprise that OpenType's structure is just an enhanced TrueType structure. In fact, one could take any TrueType font, and call it an OpenType font. TrueType fonts are technically horrible. They are binary, consist of tables, and cannot be edited by standard text editors. Same for OpenType. Forget the calls by just about every font software hacker (including myself) for a format that is simple, human-readable, and easy to change in a text editor. That would be too good. Attempts at such fonts exist: the PostScript type 3 format is basically a human-readable Postscript program. Easy to change, but perhaps not so accessible to the general public. Metafont, Knuth's font format, is also a program. It lacks visual support, and is rarely used outside the mathematical and linguistic communities. Still, the principle is right. Van Blokland and Van Rossum (Letterror) have for years been trying to convince font producers to have one basic human-readable format, perhaps in a mark-up language format such as XML. A good font should be such that if a person wanted to put an accent on a letter, he/she could do that in under 5 minutes, without anyone's assistance. This is just not possible with OpenType or TrueType, and barely with type 1.

Press releases

¶ Adobe released this wonderful press release, from which I will liberally quote now. Adobe: With OpenType, typography becomes less complicated and more powerful than ever before. If a company states it explicitly, you can bet your last pair of shoes that the opposite is true. It is part of the North-American culture. Typography less complicated? That is a laugh---OpenType requires tables for everything, from character positioning, to ligatures, kerning, letter substitution, coding vectors, and in fact, if you feel like adding a table of your own, only understood by your application, you could add just that. To make an OpenType family is a major job that cannot at present be done by any of the hordes of font enthusiasts used to Fontographer or Font Creator. Faces in a family must have proper naming and have to follow certain rules. There is a reason for this--the companies want font production and font sales back in their hands. So, they make things complicated in the name of something else---typography will be "more powerful than ever before". The biggest, the greatest, the largest, the fastest. And the most gullible public. ¶ Compatible with standard Adobe PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts, an OpenType font consists of a single font file that can be used on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms and contains all of the data required to use the font on-screen and in print, providing better cross-platform portability and easier font management. OpenType can indeed put a wrapper around a type 1 font, and that would be it. Thus, any application developer now needs to do triple work, decode OpenType, and interpret TrueType and type 1 font files. Cross-platform portability? I guess so, but that is a smokescreen: type 1 and TrueType fonts are portable too, subject to very minor changes. For example, to make a Mac TrueType font into a PC TrueType font, all you need to do is to strip off a few bytes from the beginning of the program. I have become so accustomed to this that I can do it now in a simple text editor (vi, on UNIX), in under 6 seconds a manual conversion. Some people make money selling converters for this, but again, did the companies ever tell you what I just revealed? No. So, portability is a non-issue. If they really wanted portability, both the Mac and the PC people would have accepted each other's format ages ago. So, the answer is no, they were not interested in it in the first place, did not help at all in the development of converters (all converters have been written by volunteers and third parties), and wanted to protect their own turf. How pathetic now to claim that cross-platform portability is high on their list of priorities. As to the claim of "easier font management": I always thought that there was no shortage of good font managers. Again, if it is important now, why was it not an issue 5 years ago? ¶ OpenType fonts can also contain tens of thousands of glyphs (far more than other font formats), unleashing exciting typographic capabilities. Not true. TrueType fonts can contain over 65,000 glyphs. Type 1 too can contain a huge number of glyphs, although only 256 can be activated at any given time when the font is in use. ¶ With OpenType it's now easy to access and use alternate characters, such as old-style figures, true small capitals, fractions, swashes, superiors, inferiors, titling letters, ornaments, and a full range of standard and custom ligatures. What is new? Same with the other font formats. ¶ Plus, OpenType fonts can support multiple language character sets such as Cyrillic and Greek, as well as accented characters for European languages such as Turkish and Polish - all in the same font file. Again, same with TrueType and type 1. ¶ All standard Macintosh and Windows applications can use OpenType fonts, and some applications, such as Adobe InDesign[tm], have been engineered to make it easier to select glyphs and apply fine typographic features. Now wait a minute. Yes, InDesign can access some of the fancy OpenType tables. Since it is an Adobe product, it has to. But "all" standard applications? That is plainly false. And by the way, I doubt if InDesign will ever be as clever in its choice of wordspacing, hyphenation, kerning, paragraph positioning, and so on, as TeX, Knuth's wonderful typesetting program.

How much?

¶ How much will it cost? Be prepared for a shock: The Chaparral Pro Opticals family of fonts sells for 299USD. It's the first law of economics: when you have the monopoly, clean up right away. Don't make it easy for others to make OpenType fonts. So, expect Adobe to make several high-priced packages of OpenType fonts, and to slow down when the market gets saturated, as it did with type 1 and truetype.

What shall we do?

¶ Do you have to throw away your favorite TrueType and type 1 collections? Absolutely not. For one thing, the PostScript wave is unstoppable, and PostScript accepts type 1 fonts and truetype fonts. Yes--you read this right, truetype fonts: there exists a wrapper for truetype fonts that makes them into type 42 PostScript fonts, that are understood by the newest generation of printers and PostScript screen viewers. So, PostScript and the two main formats won't go away soon. The MacOS X and UNIX/X-Windows crowds can sleep quietly. For the PC, the answer depends to some extent on Microsoft. They can't from one day to the next disallow older font formats without creating a mutiny, so I expect them to be plotting, as I write, on how to jam OpenType down your collective throats. The years ahead will be interesting. But as the last decade has shown, two very different type formats can coexist and flourish simultaneously, each carving out a niche in the market--type 1 was and remains the preferred format for graphic designers, publishing houses and scientific documents, while TrueType was and is the preferred format of the public, the people who have to do homework assignments, or write birthday party invitations. Maybe, just maybe, three formats can coexist for a while. OpenType cannot possibly conquer the public by its features (they are not needed) or its price (they can't afford it), so some degree of force will be necessary. It can conquer the former, more sophisticated, type 1 market if the major applications for typesetting (such as InDesign, perhaps) are generally accepted, but many people won't have the courage to build a completely new font collection, which will take years. So, the going will be tough.

What could have been...

¶ And yet, it is so easy to design one simple text format for fonts. It can be done, and I hope it will be done. A font should exist in only one copy on your computer. By keeping TrueType, type 1 and OpenType copies, one is running the risk of losing consistency in documents, and creating typographic mayhem because of the subtle differences in various versions of one typeface. Let us call that format the KERNEL. There should be one KERNEL, period. All font editors should edit that format. People can add to it, change things, play with it. That KERNEL can be surrounded by simple programs that generate the various formats needed, on the fly. It can create TrueType, as needed, when needed. It can create type 1, as needed, when needed. But all changes to the font are done just once, in the KERNEL. There will be no multiple contaminated copies or inconsistent versions. It can be done, but it will take an enormous effort on the part of the entire community. If some volunteer hacker were to design the format, and provide the viewing and editing tools, and those on-the-fly converters, free of charge to all users in the world for all platforms, it might succeed against the companies' wishes.

Copyright © 2002 Luc Devroye School of Computer Science McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 luc@cs.mcgill.ca http://luc.devroye.org/index.html