Early Altsys Manuals and Marketing

Mark Simonson
Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
edited August 14 in Type Design Software
I’m a bit of a pack rat, so I have a lot of printed materials from the early days of making fonts on Macs. I recently scanned most of what I have related to Altsys and uploaded it all to the Internet Archive. If you're interested, here is a list:
The newsletters include news and information about FONTastic, FONTastic Plus, Fontographer, FreeHand, Virtuoso (FreeHand-like app for Next), EPS Exchange, Family Builder, Metamorphosis, Art Importer, and Style Merger.

I’m missing Fontasia Vol 7, which would have been issued in 1992. If anyone has a copy of this and can scan it, I would love to add it to this collection. 

As far as I know, Vol 8 was the last issue. Altsys was acquired by Macromedia in 1995.

Note: The FONTastic Plus manual was not part of my collection, nor did I scan it. Thanks to @George Thomas for posting a PDF of it on TypeDrawers a few weeks back. I took the liberty of uploading it to the Internet Archive with the rest. It was apparently uploaded to Macintosh Garden in 2012 by (I assume) whoever scanned it, but hadn’t been uploaded to the IA.
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Comments

  • Christopher Slye
    Christopher Slye Posts: 150
    Fontographer, yikes: “A single point is necessary for defining any blank character, like the space character (#32). Version 3.2 automatically includes a point; do not remove it. Versions prior to and including 3.0 do not include this point. If you are using one of these versions, drop any point (curve, corner, tangent) into the character and adjust the width. This defines the space.” [Altsys Newsletter vol. 5, p4]

    This is great, Mark. I’ve just started uploading a few things to the Internet Archive, to get a feel for it. I figure it’s one of the better places to preserve stuff (digitally).
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 927
    Christopher Slye said:
    Fontographer, yikes: “A single point is necessary for defining any blank character, like the space character (#32).
    Ha, I remember this. When we were converting the Font Bureau library to OpenType, ca. 2014, among the rest of the tools and routines, I had a simple script to go through and remove this dummy point from the entire library.

    It’s probably just nostalgia talking, but I miss Fontographer and FreeHand. Leaving FreeHand behind essentially marked the end of my [short-lived] illustration career. I never really made the transition to Adobe Illustrator.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
    edited August 14
    Looking back at Altsys’ early printed matter, it’s so unpolished and amateurish. They clearly didn’t have anyone with design experience working on it, compared to software from bigger companies at the time. It’s partly because desktop publishing wasn’t really a thing yet and they probably couldn’t afford typesetting.

    The first FONTastic manual appears to have been made with an ImageWriter dot-matrix printer, as were a lot of manuals back then. You can see their materials get more sophisticated over a short period of time as the tools for desktop publishing evolved, including the very tools they were making.

    All of the fonts they used were fonts made with Fontographer, such as the version of Goudy Oldstyle they sold for a little while and Joe Treacy’s TFHabitat and TFForever, the latter becoming part of their corporate identity into the nineties.

    It’s fascinating to me to look at this stuff and realize that this is where the entire modern indie font industry got its start.
  • Christopher Slye
    Christopher Slye Posts: 150
    @Kent Lew” Same! I did a lot of work as an illustrator using FreeHand, and to this day I find Illustrator difficult to use. I also have a lot of old FreeHand files that I can’t access without a big software project to convert them (which I hope to do someday).

    @Mark Simonson” I did my share of “print at 300 dpi and ship it” projects. Terrible to see them when I run across them. I can’t imagine using an ImageWriter though. One must have their standards.

    I started type design later, so my Fontographer experience began maybe around 1992. Their material seemed pretty polished by then. Fun to look at this old stuff. (Even Adobe has some pretty weird, old stuff in their archives from the early days.)
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
    I used Illustrator from version 1.0 and always preferred its pen tool over the Fontographer or FreeHand pen tools. I think it was mostly just that Adobe used an off-screen buffer so the animation as you manipulated the path was smoother. The curves themselves were also smoother. Early versions of Fontographer had very bumpy curves.


  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
    I also have a lot of old FreeHand files that I can’t access without a big software project to convert them (which I hope to do someday).

    @Christopher Slye, drop me a line and I can help you set up a virtual classic Mac for that.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,429
    WOW MARK. This is FANTASTIC. 

    THANK YOU!!!
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,724
    You're welcome.
  • Christopher Slye
    Christopher Slye Posts: 150
    Mark Simonson said:
    @Christopher Slye, drop me a line and I can help you set up a virtual classic Mac for that.
    I definitely will do that — thanks!

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