30th anniversary of TrueType
Rob McKaughan
Posts: 39
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Apple / Microsoft joint announcement of TrueType.
Greg Hitchcock posted a little retrospective of it here (sprinkled with Greg's usual blend of obscure trivia and insider stories): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thirty-years-truetype-fonts-greg-hitchcock/
Greg Hitchcock posted a little retrospective of it here (sprinkled with Greg's usual blend of obscure trivia and insider stories): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thirty-years-truetype-fonts-greg-hitchcock/
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MacWEEK, 26 September 1989, Vol. 3 No.34:
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Oops, there was one other interesting article in that issue:
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"Jobs said he thought IBM, as the leading vendor of desktop computers, would be the final arbiter of type standards."
Not exactly how it played out.2 -
Thanks for sharing this here Rob!0
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Marc Oxborrow said:"Jobs said he thought IBM, as the leading vendor of desktop computers, would be the final arbiter of type standards."
Not exactly how it played out.Well, OS/2 definitely did choose to use TrueType for its fonts. I'll admit that given the commercial success of Microsoft Windows, we can probably speculate that its choice, rather than that of OS/2, was the more influential.But, in the immortal words of Criswell, "Can you prove it didn't happen"?Oh, wait, that's a Bell Labs operating system.0 -
John Savard said:Marc Oxborrow said:"Jobs said he thought IBM, as the leading vendor of desktop computers, would be the final arbiter of type standards."
Not exactly how it played out.Well, OS/2 definitely did choose to use TrueType for its fonts.
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Interestingly, FreeType was created to bring TrueType to OS/2. Here is a quote from an interview with David Turner:I started working on FreeType 1 during the winter of 1995. At that time I was a graduate student and was developing mostly on OS/2. It was really a nifty operating system but it didn’t support TrueType fonts at all. I had read on the Internet that it was possible to “plug” a new font renderer into the system with a properly written DLL. Despite the fact that I had absolutely no documentation on the topic, I thought it would be a cool and useful project, and I started cranking my first rasterizer in Pascal, no less.
My first visit to Adobe in Mountain View was a little more than a month after the TrueType announcement was, on behalf of IBM, to help Adobe understand OS/2 font metrics for integrating ATM.
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Oops. And having briefly used OS/2 a little, I should have remembered that. Ah, well, I was in a rush, not wanting to let the opportunity for an amazing joke to pass me by...
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Ah yes, ATM, what a great font manager that was.0
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