Re: Helvetica needed

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Larry et.al.:

Sorry I couldn't readily respond when this was more current, but
I do have a few observations:

(1) As far as we know, the templates provided with FrameMaker 7
(and even those provided with FrameMaker 6) were converted to
use Arial instead of Helvetica and Times New Roman instead of
Times Roman, consistent with the fact that Adobe no longer
distributed the Helvetica and Times Roman font families with
either FrameMaker or Acrobat AND that Arial and Times New Roman
are effectively bundled with both MacOS and Windows. If you have
evidence otherwise, please advise ... Possibly one or more styles
that weren't directly accessed in those templates did not get
converted. But please tell us which ...  For better or worse, we
didn't reissue the additional templates downloadable from Adobe's
web site either to reflect the newer file formats or to change
the fonts. Those templates continue to work as expected on older
versions of FrameMaker with the fonts that were current at the
time.

(2) The term "PostScript fonts" is somewhat meaningless since
both Adobe PostScript and Acrobat fully support both Type 1
and TrueType (Type 42) fonts. The font wars were over in the
early 1990s, folks! You say that FrameMaker "just couldn't seem
to figure out how to match up PS & TT versions of the same font."
Well, that was part of the problem. There WEREN'T PS (i.e., Type 1)
and TT (i.e., TrueType) versions of the "same" font installed.
On the Macintosh, the Type 1 Adobe Helvetica is NOT the same font
as the TrueType Apple Helvetica, although Apple very unwisely
chose to give their version which came later, the same exact
menu and PostScript name as the Adobe Type 1 version. You have
no idea how many prepress problems I have seen caused by this
unfortunate decision at Apple nearly ten years ago. (They even
continued this crime into MacOS X!) Similarly, the only thing
the same about Adobe Type 1 Helvetica and Times Roman fonts
and the Microsoft (actually Monotype) TrueType Arial and Times
New Roman fonts are the advance widths for common characters.
At least Microsoft and Monotype had the sense to name (and 
actually were legally prohibited from naming) their fonts with
the same menu and PostScript names.

(3) Fonts were bundled with application programs when it was
felt that end-users saw added value from same. The feedback
we get is that designers use the fonts that they feel are
appropriate to the job at hand and license them on that basis.
They don't typically choose fonts on the basis of what came
bundled with application programs they may be using at the time.
Thus, our customers don't and won't buy new licenses and/or
upgrades on the basis of bundled fonts.

(4) Similarly, printer-resident fonts are not generally seen
as a printer feature anymore. In fact, the PPD hacks that I have
actively encouraged over the last two years to solve the infamous
ITC Zapf Dingbats problem and to avoid "missing fonts" messages
effectively result in PostScript printer resident fonts not 
being used at all. This forces printing to be done from the fonts
you compose with without any assumptions about what fonts may
be on the target system. The performance advantages that 
printer-resident fonts had disappeared years ago as high speed
Ethernet, IEEE 1284, and USB communications protocols replaced
LocalTalk, RS232 serial, and slow speed uni-directional Centronics
communications and as printer memory prices dropped dramatically!

(5) With Acrobat 4, we embarked on a strategy that encouraged
end-users to embed all fonts, subsetted, into their PDF files.
Recipients of such PDF files no longer needed to worry about
font substitutions and visual anomalies that would result.
What you compose with is exactly what the recipient of your
electronic document in PDF form sees and prints!

(6) With Acrobat 6, just announced, we will no longer provide
Type 1 versions of Arial and Times New Roman as substitutes for
unembedded Helvetica and Times Roman fonts. If you have the system
TrueType versions of Arial and Times New Roman (standard under
both Windows and MacOS these days) and you don't have Helvetica
or Times Roman families installed in your fonts directories, those
will be used for substitution for unembedded Helvetica and Times Roman
fonts. And if you clobbered your system Arial and Times New Roman,
we will use the Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif Multiple Master substitution
fonts as a last resort.

(7) Although Adobe is both a font foundry (with our own excellent
"Adobe Originals" designs) and a font vendor (including thousands of
faces from the "Adobe Originals" collection as well as high quality,
popular fonts from other font foundries, we assume that users will
license and use fonts from a wide array of sources, including those
bundled with the operating system and other available from other font
vendors as well as fonts from Adobe.

I am an admitted "fontaholic" (what else would you expect from "Fontsy Dov"
... bad inside, bi-lingual joke, sorry), but I would really wish that all
of you would NEVER get into a Helvetica/Times/Courier rut ...

        - Dov

At 4/8/2003 07:50 AM, larry.kollar@arrisi.com wrote:
>>> FrameMaker _*should*_ certainly include the two fonts
>>> that cause the majority of missing font errors due to
>>> default expectations built into FrameMaker: Times
>>> Roman and Helvetica.
>>
>> And certainly since they still seem to be required by all the Adobe provided
>> templates. Considering the price of the software it really does seem that Adobe
>> is being increadibly cheap not including at least a minimal number of fonts with
>> the various packages.
>
>It's worse than that. It used to be when you bought a
>PostScript printer, you would get a disk with a fairly
>sizeable collection of Adobe fonts -- not only Times &
>Helvetica, but Avant Garde, Bookman, Palatino, the
>Zapfs (Chancery and her Dingbat sister), and IIRC my
>disk came with Cooper Black and one or two others that
>I've forgotten. The printer wheezed its last a couple
>of years ago, but I still have the floppy in a box
>somewhere.
>
>Hardware (which Adobe doesn't make) gets cheaper, while
>software (which Adobe *does* make) gets more expensive,
>then they nickle-and-dime us to death with fonts. Maybe
>it's not as necessary as it once was, in these days when
>both MacOS and Windows come with a large collection of
>TrueType fonts, but you'd think that Adobe would at least
>continue to offer the most common fonts as a loss-leader.
>
>Maybe Adobe is doing us an unintended favor, forcing us
>to climb out of the Times/Helvetica/Courier rut. I've
>started using Verdana for short documents -- it's clear
>in small type sizes & works well as both body and heading
>font. For longer documents, I've been looking at some of
>the offerings from Apostrophic Labs
>(http://www.apostrophiclab.com/) -- Day Roman looks good &
>has an expert set as well. Meanwhile, I think of Adobe
>less & less as a source for fonts.
>
>Returning to Frame for a moment, when latter-day versions
>of Windows stopped including PostScript fonts, Frame just
>couldn't seem to figure out how to match up PS & TT
>versions of the same font. The problem went away when I
>ditched the PostScript fonts on my Mac & went to TrueType.
>Sad, I used to be a PostScript chauvinist...
>
>--
>Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS


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