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ABOUT

Christopher Slye

Born in Los Altos, CA, Christopher Slye studied art history at the University of California at Santa Cruz and worked as a graphic designer until joining the type group at Adobe in 1997, where he assisted with the design and production of Adobe's type library. He was involved in the creation of Adobe's OTF fonts, and had a hand in both Myriad Pro (1992, with Robert Slimbach, Carol Twombly and Fred Brady) and Tekton Pro. At Font Bureau, he designed Elmhurst (1997), a 7-style transitional family. He was Technical Product Manager, Type, at Adobe in San Jose, and managed all type-related business and licensing activity at Adobe, including its cloud font service, Adobe Fonts. In 2021, he became president of Type Network, succeeding Paley Dreier in that role.

FontShop link. MyFonts link. FontBureau link. Adobe link.

At ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik, he spoke on CFF on the web. The abstract is quite promising and the talk may quite opossibly be the highlight of the technical program at that meeting: Digital type outlines are described, for the most part, in either of two fundamental formats: PostScript or TrueType. Today, OpenType fonts convey PostScript outlines with CFF (the Compact Font Format), which is an optimized successor to the original Type 1 font format. Although the world of print output has been dominated by PostScript Type 1/CFF, the TrueType format has prevailed in the Windows and Mac OS operating systems. TrueType is well known for its accommodation for extensive hinting instructions, evident in many Windows core fonts which have become de facto standards on the web.In the explosion of web fonts during recent years, TrueType's reputation as a screen font format and its superior rendering in Windows browsers has made it a virtual requirement for those seeking consistency and quality in type rendering with web fonts. However, with recent improvements in text rendering from Microsoft's DirectWrite, CFF rendering quality will soon be comparable to TrueType in the next generation of Windows browsers. Despite its second class status on the web today, CFF still possesses advantages worth assessing as its rendering quality on screens approaches parity with TrueType. For example, CFF is inherently compact, and its PostScript (Bezier) paths are the default format for virtually all font designers. This presentation will explain the technical and practical advantages of the CFF font format and compare them to TrueType. It will examine what the future holds for CFF as a web font format, and make the case for CFF as a worthy, if not superior, solution for web typography.

Klingspor link. Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Christopher Slye
 [Designer info]
Klingspor Museum page
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INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type scene in California ⦿ Architectural lettering/typefaces ⦿ Web fonts ⦿