Argonne National Laboratory is managed by The University of Chicago for the U.S. Department of Energy Fonts and Acrobat* Cathy Eyberger, Argonne National Laboratory 2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy November 14-18, 2005 * Work supported by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, under Contract No. W ENG-38.

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, A (Very) Brief History of Type Woodcut printing –China, mid 800s –Korea, early 1200s –Japan, 1600s Moveable, reusable type –Europe, Gutenberg, mid 1400s –Flourished in Europe because of the smaller number of characters or ‘glyphs’ in the language –Early typical runs: books; Martin Luther’s used Gutenberg’s invention to print his Theses—with great success

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, The Industrial Revolution and Type – mid 1800s to 1950s Gutenberg’s basic process was unchanged for centuries In the mid 1800s rotary and steam presses replaced hand-operated ones –Reduced printing time by 84% In 1889 the Linotype machine, followed by the Monotype, transformed typesetting itself by allowing the type to be chosen, used, then recirculated back into the machine automatically –Reduced printing time by another 85% Also in the mid 1880s a pantographic device that automated the punchcutting process was invented –Could scale, compress, or expand characters The point measurement system was adopted A rudimentary pantograph Linotype machine

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, Photocomposition Era – mid 1950s to mid 1970s Typeface masters are on film; characters are projected onto photosensitive paper Lenses are used to adjust the size of the image, scaling type to desired size A sophisticated solution to the limitations of typesetting machines (e.g., ligatures, retention of proportion when resizing, etc.) Just as this was coming into prominent use, the era of digital composition arrived

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, The Digital Era – early 1970s to present Character encoding – the mapping of a repertoire of abstract characters (glyphs) into natural numbers such that a number sequence represents text ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Interchange Basic ASCII character set (ca. 1970) –7-bit characters that allowed for 2 7 = 128 ‘slots’ –94 slots for glyphs, 33 for control codes, 1 for an empty space –TOO LIMITED; couldn’t even handle Spanish, French, or German

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, The Digital Era (continued) Extended ASCII (in use since 1980) –8-bit character set –2 8 = 256 slots with anywhere from 216 to 230 slots for glyphs –Adequate for basic communications in the ‘official’ languages of Western Europe and North America –Inadequate for mathematicians, linguists, and the millions of people around the world who used the Latin alphabet for Czech, Hungarian, Navajo, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh languages, just to name a few –Also inadequate for the rest of the world’s population who used non- Latin alphabets such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Thai –STILL TOO LIMITED

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, The Digital Era (continued) Unicode (early 1990s to present) –16-bit character set with 2 16 = 65,536 slots –By 2000 the operating systems of home computers and major digital founders had adopted Unicode as the new encoding standard –Capable of handling a global Latin alphabet along with hundreds of other non-Latin characters and scripts –Developers soon realized that 65,000+ slots wasn’t enough –To extend the set, 2 10 = 2,048 of the original 65,536 slots were assigned to function in pairs; double-byte fonts –This provided an additional = 1,048,576 characters –In the latest version (2003), Unicode defines 96,382 characters, sets 137,468 aside for private use, and still has over 878,000 slots free for future allocation –ROOM TO SPARE!

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, Definitions A brief pause for some definitions: –Hinting: Instructions added to a font that tell the character outlines how to reshape themselves at low and medium resolutions in order to create character images of maximum clarity –Cubic spline: defines the positions of the curves' end points and uses 2 other points (usually not on the curve) to indirectly define the tangents at the end points –Quadratic spline: approximates end points rather than matching them A simple cubic spline Same curve reconceived as two quadratic splines

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, Type 1, True Type, and Open Type Fonts Type 1 fonts –One of Adobe’s Postscript fonts –Based on earlier Type 3 fonts but smaller, faster, and had ‘hinting’ –Used cubic splines or curves to draw character outlines –Requires two files: character outlines and metrics data (width, kerning) –By the late 1980s Type 1 was the font standard –Based on the 256-character Extended ASCII character set, but Macintosh and Windows operating systems use different subsets of it (e.g., ligatures in Mac, fractions in Windows) –Generally accompanied by a set of bitmapped fonts for screen display on systems without Postscript interpreters –Still the de facto standard for publishing and the graphic arts

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, Type 1, True Type, and Open Type Fonts (continued) True Type fonts –Developed through a collaboration between Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s; released in –Used quadratic B-splines to draw curves –Used hinting to display on-screen fonts accurately (instead of bitmapped fonts) –Early versions were based on Extended ASCII character set –Later versions able to handle larger character sets (e.g., Unicode) Room for alternate forms of characters Permitted contextual character switching (automatic substitution of one character for another) –Primary advantage over Type 1 fonts: potential for better hinting

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, Type 1, True Type, and Open Type Fonts (continued) Open Type fonts –Hybrid font format developed by Adobe and Microsoft beginning in 1996 –Open Type = True Type + Postscript in a common wrapper –Has the potential to combine the best of both formats transparently –Based on Unicode encoding –Written in a file format that allows the same font file to be used on a Mac and a PC –One font can include the standard form of a glyph plus all its variants (e.g., italic, small caps, old style, ornaments, ligatures, etc.) for dozens of different languages and different scripts, all in a variety of weights and sizes

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, Type 1, True Type, and Open Type Fonts (continued) Observations on Open Type –Con: Open Type not yet widely supported in applications –Pro: Adobe has shipped its entire library of more than 2200 fonts in Open Type –Caveat: True Type and Open Type fonts offer a wide range of features that may or may not be built into every font—you don’t know unless the font features are documented somehow

2005 JACoW Team Meeting, Frascati, Italy, November 14-18, For More Information... Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style James Felici, The Complete Manual of Typography