Clic The Technology

Posts Tagged ‘fonts’

Within the tiny confraternity of metal type founders and letter press printers there is a sub tribe that can argue day and night about recipes for type metal. In such a company, the question of whether to add or subtract five per cent of tin or antimony, or one per cent of copper, can lead to a long and heated exchange. In the community of digital founders and programmers, there is a  corresponding sub tribe capable of arguing till death about the merits of one digital format versus another. Between 1980 and 2000, several digital formats were introduced. Each format’s sponsors claimed their product was superior to its predecessors, and sometimes they had grounds to make such claims. In every case, however, it has turned out that what genuinely matters is not the format used so much as the level of hands-on workmanship, good sense and attention to detail. In metal and digital founding alike, the standard is set by the human who does the work, not by the recipe or by the brand name of the tools. Bitmapped fonts came into use in the 1970S. Fonts of this sort are defined by simple addition and subtraction: this pixel on, that pixel off, these pixels on, those pixels off. In 1982, with the introduction of PostScript, bitmapped printer fonts rapidly gave way to fonts defined as scalable outlines.