I think there is a general fear still of the Opentype format. Part of that fear is just change. Nobody likes change. But the other fear is, “will it work in my workflow?” A fair question considering not everyone uses OT savvy software.

Maybe I’m missing something, but several of the better book designers I know stick with Quark because they continue to rely on fonts with their own custom kerning tables.

I would think about where your customers are likely to be. If you are expecting most of your sales to come from wealthy nations, you can probably stick with Opentype. But if you expect to sell type in places where people have less to spend and are still getting by with old computers, old operating systems, and old software, also selling Type 1 seems worthwhile.

It also depends on the scripts and languages your typeface covers. I wouldn’t generate Type 1 fonts that go outside the Latin-1 encoding, simply because the Type 1 format only allows you to encode 256 characters and ISO_8859-1 (a.k.a. Latin-1) matches exactly the first two Unicode blocks (Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement).

“several of the better book designers I know stick with Quark because they continue to rely on fonts with their own custom kerning tables”

Which has what to do with the question? Unless they are using really old versions of QuarkXPress, *and* your font has extra typographic goodies that you’d put in bonus/supplemental fonts if it was Type 1.

Regards,

T

No offense, but I think you’ve said it. People who have older systems in place and are getting good results or need to set up clients to use a font when they don’t have the right applications might want a Type 1 option.

People who have older systems in place and are getting good results or need to set up clients to use a font when they don’t have the right applications might want a Type 1 option.

And then one day a client comes along who wants them to use a specific typeface, or a custom typeface, that is only available in OpenType and requires use of Unicode text and OpenType Layout, and suddenly the whole workflow becomes untenable. I’ve seen this recently in the particularly problematic case of a design agency using hack encoded Type 1 fonts for Hindi with proprietary InDesign plug-ins. Their entire workflow is based around this system, and it is a major obstacle to use of new typefaces. Needless to say, it is also an obstacle to text interchange, since the hack encoding is completely non-standard, recognised only by this plug-in, and not cross-platform compatible.

Type 1 has inertia.
Adobe can afford to not sell that format (in fact, it’s in their interests to migrate users to OpenType), but foundries would be foolish to turn their noses up at customers who want it.
So we make new fonts available in the legacy format, and people keep buying.

Type 1 has legs, economically.
OpenType has introduced a price differential into the market—Type 1 licences cost less than OpenType.
They may not be such good value for money, but if you don’t need all the bells and whistle...

> Adobe can afford to not sell that format

Actually, users can still license Type 1 fonts through Adobe’s Type Store; they’re just a little bit harder to find*. They’re still made available mainly for legacy reasons, i.e. if a user really needs those old versions for whatever reason, he can still get them.

*and some families don’t have Type 1 versions at all

> in fact, it’s in their interests to migrate users to OpenType

Adobe finished converting its whole library to OpenType in 2003, and stopped developing Type 1 fonts in 1999. The Type 1 format is almost 25 years old and is unsuitable for today’s typographic and technological needs. That said, migrating to OpenType should, in fact, be of *everyone’s* interest.

> Type 1 has legs, economically. [...] They may not be such good value for money, but if you don’t need all the bells and whistle...

Be careful, because that might come back to bite you. Or maybe not, if your business model is to sell outdated technology to your customers, which you’re aware of (and perhaps they’re not), and in a few years time sell it back again in OT format.

Anyway, it won’t hurt anyone to read this blog post again:
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2005/10/phasing_out_typ.html

The OT benefits are all well and good, but for a simple typeface, if you don’t NEED multi-language support, ligatures, small caps, etc..., then a Type 1 format has the advantage of being a more economical file and useable in the widest variety of current software.

If you’re a type fiend, it’s worth noting that your system will bog down a lot quicker with X number of OT fonts installed than it will with X number of T1 fonts installed.

Thomas and Miguel—thanks for all your great work. I’m sure you are used to defending Adobe, but comments are being made not about personal use but about general market observations

I’ve noted since making my original comment that there are some Indy plug-ins that allow kerning modification. beyond the stock Indy capabilities.

Umm… we’re almost in 2008. The death of PostScript Type 1 fonts has been promulgated since the late 90s, and I remember sitting in lectures about the subject in 2005. Who even makes Type 1 fonts anymore? Really, they are dead. Sorry. Don’t some new Microsoft products even not support them at all?

Ryan,

>a Type 1 format has the advantage of being a more economical file

Can you explain that? I thought it was just the other way round.

While OT has features to compress the font data, resulting in smaller file sizes (or much fuller-featured fonts in nearly the same file sizes) than T1, there is a certain added labor involved in getting all those other OT features working. So arguments can be made that either is more economical than the other, depending on your point of view.

So, are you saying that an OT font without features still uses more system resources than a T1 font? Or do you mean human labor?
I am talking of OT fonts that are equivalent to T1 fonts in character set and (not existing) features. Let’s not compare apples and oranges.

Amen, Tim.

My understanding is that OT fonts are only an accessibility problem when extra glyphs like figures and small caps are inaccessible within non-OT-savvy apps (old Quark, MS Office). As long as you release OT versions of your fonts that are formatted for these apps (figure sets and small caps in separate fonts) then I cannot see a single reason to continue producing fonts in PS format.

We should also remember that people aren’t always buying PS because they need it — they also choose it simply because it’s cheaper. You can always offer pared down versions of your OT fonts for the bargain hunters. Format has nothing to do with price or feature excess.

I long for the day when all fonts are OpenType and various offerings of the same typeface are distinguished by their feature/glyph set, not by their format. Font makers have the power to shift this paradigm now.

This is an interesting topic. I’m still in phase one - are we talking all Type 1 - or PC Type 1 or Mac Type 1.

You see, I am on the latest equipment, and I run Quark 7.3 and other programs that support OT. Guess what guys - it just isn’t there yet. I watch proofs come back from the printer - and I end up making fonts Mac Type 1 - because they are stable, usable and get the job printed the way I designed it.

Maybe OT is the future - but the future is not here yet. It might be fine for a website designer, a kid in school, I don’t know. What I do know is when it comes to production - I have to use what can be reproduced faithfully. (And that is not OT!)

Jackie T — I watch proofs come back from the printer - and I end up making fonts Mac Type 1 - because they are stable, usable and get the job printed the way I designed it.

Do you have examples for things that went wrong with OT fonts?

Yup - news to me, too. We’ve been selling about 85% OpenType for years, and we don’t know of any major production issues.

I’ll concede that QuarkXPress is not the main focus of our testing, so maybe we’ve missed something there....

As for Type 1, Microsoft doesn’t support it in their new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) graphics/text framework. It remains to be seen how quickly or thoroughly WPF will be adopted by applications, but it’s not a good sign.

Cheers,

T

I have an example of things that go wrong with OT fonts today. I’ll use Cronos Pro as an example, though there are others. See the attached screenshots, which are what the short repertoire looks like in Mac Font Book when you install Cronos Pro, as opposed to a “nice” OT font like Adobe Garamond. Notice the latin alphabet has somehow been cross-linked with foreign language equivalents. I’m not an expert in Unicode and Font Lab Studio et al., so I don’t know the technical reason why this occurs. But I know the result.

In current versions of Microsoft Office products, a font like Cronos Pro, when installed, confuses it to no end. You can select text and Cronos will result; but as soon as you click ANYWHERE on the text, or move the cursor across text, Word (for example) will freak out and the entire word will revert back to the previous typeface selected.

I am guessing this has something to do with Word’s inability to handle OT fonts, and I wish I knew a solution. For now, my advice to others (and myself) has simply been to avoid using fonts like this until Office 2008 comes out.

Weird, running 10.5.1, here’s what Font Book shows me for Cronos:

—-

At my workplace, we’re avoiding Type 1 fonts like the plague; we’ve had a lot of issues with T1 fonts corrupting the font cache on 10.4.x. And, we’ve never had problems with printer, even the not-particularly-state-of-the-art newspaper press we deal with, handling OT fonts.

(On the Cronos issue: have you tried cleaning your font caches? Onyx can do it, as can FontExplorer.)

So, when you had these problems, did you report them or contacting Adobe tech support?

What’s interesting is that AFAIK Cronos Pro and Adobe Garamond Pro have identical language support.

The Word problem in particular sounds like an OS X font caching problem, not necessarily related to the particular font or its format. Have you tried nuking OS X font caches?

If that’s not it.... What exact version of Word and of OS X are you using?

Do you have the entire Cronos Pro family installed with all the optical size variants?

Cheers,

T

(Cross-posting there. Not surprised to see other people NOT having the same problem. If everyone did, we would have heard about it a lot earlier.)

Thanks everyone for your insight.

I might pick up on the suggestion of stephen coles to produce different OT versions of the fonts to suffice different needs of non-OT-savvy apps or issues of pricing and therefore do away with type-1 production.

Or does anyone see any major problems with that? Nobody has commented on stephens suggestion yet. A couple more opinions on that would be great.

Thanks a lot everyone!
Henning

Problem solved, thanks Thomas. It wasn’t a bad font file, which was right off the main Adobe disc. It wasn’t a system font cache problem either; those are cleaned regularly. We’re still using 10.3.9 so we need to use Font Finagler to clean the caches; Font Nuke works for Tiger. The problem—Font Finagler doesn’t see Microsoft Office’s own font cache. Once I manually trash that, then clean the system caches, all is well. Weird. But then, no one has yet figured out the behavior of how these caches get corrupted over time.....

Henning,
Or does anyone see any major problems with that? Nobody has commented on stephens suggestion yet. A couple more opinions on that would be great.

http://www.typophile.com/node/32455
This is a very interesting thread, you will find plenty of different opinions there.

We should also remember that people aren’t always buying PS because they need it — they also choose it simply because it’s cheaper.

I guess many would still buy Type1 just because of the fact that they are used to buying Type1. So many still believe that TrueType is a »bad Microsoft thing« and since Type1 worked for years, they don’t dare to try OpenType PS.

Ralf

Ryan: The OT benefits are all well and good, but for a simple typeface, if you don’t NEED multi-language support, ligatures, small caps, etc..., then a Type 1 format has the advantage of being a more economical file and useable in the widest variety of current software.

Actually, economy and useability are precisely why I won’t ever make a Type 1 font again. Even if an OpenType font contains no more glyphs than a Type 1 font, and has no added layout functionality, it is still typically a smaller file (thanks to CFF), is a single binary instead of a collection of files, and is cross-platform compatible. Further, since the OT spec is fully documented and a variety of test and diagnostic tools are available, I can provide much higher quality assurance for OT fonts than I ever could for Type 1. For Type 1 fonts, you basically hit the generate button and hoped for the best.

>>I can provide much higher quality assurance for OT fonts than I ever could for Type 1. For Type 1 fonts, you basically hit the generate button and hoped for the best.

Absolutely. The tools available for testing OT fonts are priceless, and ironically enough, mostly free.

No, let’s not do Type1 anymore. It’s bad and as a font producer it’s just another product I have to support. There is only one Type1 font left on our retail library, simply because we haven’t gotten round to convert it yet. If someone wants Type1 of the OT fonts we sell, they have to pay for the engineering, dearly. That usually puts them off. They usually buy the OT font anyway, and I never hear of any complaints. So all is well then.

For our custom clients we only supply OT (ttf based) and suggest that we prepare a Type 1 for those poor souls who still work under OS9 or in stone-age Quark 6. The Type1 fonts only get supplied on demand. And we only make MacOS Roman fonts, no other scripts. The reason is because I don’t want to support it.

The quicker we do away with Type1 the better for the font producer and user. OT is good. OT is the future.

Bruno Maag

I don’t see why Type 1 would be cheaper to produce unless it is already done and sitting there. Given that you need to produce an opentype version anyway, why add another less useful one which requires 2 files and separate platform support? Soon enough, there will be no requests for it so why feed the effort to hold on to it? It is like a video store continuing to stock Betamax tapes because someone out there might still use it.

ChrisL

I have to agree wholeheartedly with the testing comments. When Adobe product teams have problems with a Type 1 font, it is really hard for us to figure it out. Particularly for Mac Type 1 fonts. We and others have developed a lot of good testing tools for OpenType over the years.

Cheers,

T

If someone wants Type1 of the OT fonts we sell, they have to pay for the engineering, dearly.

i think this is the way it should be.

And we only make MacOS Roman fonts, no other scripts. The reason is because I don’t want to support it.

I’m not sure anyone else supports anything besides basic Latin Type-1 fonts. I kind of doubt MS Office applications do.

The quicker we do away with Type1 the better for the font producer and user. OT is good. OT is the future.

hear hear!