Apr 29 2002
Just when you thought you had completed your font collection…
In a press release issued this morning, Adobe announced that over 650 of the fonts in the Adobe Type Library are now available in OpenType format.
Adobe has confirmed that its layout product, InDesign 2.0, supports OpenType fonts and “creative professionals can now easily integrate a full range of advanced typographic features into their documents by accessing specific OpenType glyphs through a new OpenType flyout menu on the InDesign character palette.”
The OpenType format itself was designed by Adobe and Microsoft to be a cross platform font format that can include an expanded character set for expanded linguistic support and advanced typographic capabilities. The first set of OpenType fonts includes the standard range of Latin characters used throughout the western world, and several international characters, including the euro currency (€), “estimated,” and litre symbols. Future converted fonts will include merged character sets, so additional glyphs, such as oldstyle figures, small capitals, and swashes, will be contained in one font file.
In spite of that fact that OpenType fonts can be installed along side PostScript fonts, the future of the PostScript font library is now in question. Since Adobe launched the PostScript font format back at the dawn of the desktop publishing revolution in the late 1908′s, designers have built up vast collections of these fonts. Now that a new standard has been introduced will the printing industry be forced to repurchase their collections at anywhere from $29 US to $299 US per family?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the sound of this and the fact that it is in some way connected with Microsoft just has me all the more concerned.
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