Re: font books

From: peter_constable@sil.org
Date: Fri Oct 22 1999 - 02:20:49 EDT


       Sean:

>I'm trying to expand my knowledge of basic font rendering.
       Mostly I want to understand the terms better. I'm not about to
       try designing my own fonts.

>My background is in text processing, not rendering and I want
       to better understand the issues font people deal with. I guess
       that puts my request in
       the
       - how electronic fonts work / technical reference category.

       In referring to "font people", I can think of at least 6
       categories, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

       - type designers: they are concerned primarily with the visual
       appearance of glyphs - both the shapes of the glyphs themselves
       and of their relative position within a line and between lines

       - font engineers: they are concerned with getting the outlines
       created by the type designers into fonts that work and with how
       text data (strings of character codes) get transduced into
       positioned glpyhs (strings of glyph codes, possibly with
       addition metric information)

       - font technology developers: these are the people who dream up
       font formats, write rasterizers, create font development tools

       - OS type services API developers (originally I was lumping
       these into the preceding group, but they're really different:
       the latter group get paid to do this work; the former group
       typically have to do other things to get paid in addition to
       performing their magic): these people have to sort out what are
       the functions and structures that need to be made available to
       app developers so that they can display text (with varying
       degrees of typographic finesse)

       - app developers: in comparison with the preceding groups, they
       typically have to relatively little thinking about fonts,
       though that can vary depending up what they're trying to do

       - typographers, designers, typesetters and desktop publishers:
       people who use type in creating documents

       To give a good answer to your question, it would help to know
       which of these 5 categories in where your greatest interest
       lies. (My guess is the second or the fifth.)

       Have you checked out the following?

       http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.asp
       http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/main.html
       http:
       //developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/TextIntlSvcs/ATSUI/atsui.
       html
       http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/Text/Text-181.html
       (fonts.apple.com doesn't seem to want to work for me)

       Peter



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