A Brief History of Typeface and Fonts
Part I: From the 1880's to the Present
The world of Typeface began with the Linotype in 1886. The Linotype was used for generations by newspapers and general printing. It produces a solid line of type. It has a magazine with 90 channels to hold 26 caps, 26 lowercase, 10 numerals, 16 punctuation, and other symbols accessed one key at a time. Compositors used to assemble characters in a composing stick, one piece of metal at a time. The most frequently used characters were closer to the assembling "elevator" and the keyboard was arranged ETAOIN SHRDLU. Early phototypesetter film strips also had 90 characters.
Ninety characters did not prove to be enough, so Pi fonts gave us additional collections of math and other symbols. Pi fonts used to be any font that does not have standard letters for setting text. These days they are commonly called Symbolic fonts. The modern Pi fonts are the fonts with special typographical symbols such as Dingbats or Windings. Compugraphic in the late 1980s developed FAIS, a scalable font format to do battle with Type 1 and Apple’s TrueType. It used rub-down sheets of Pi symbols to supplement their film fonts. It continues to be used inside today's Hewlett Packard laser printers.
In the early 1980s, Adobe teamed with Apple to develop PostScript as a way of displaying type on screen as well as in print. Printer fonts for the Apple LaserWriter were based on PostScript Type 1 outlines, resulting in an excellent output at any size. They also developed Bass (a scalable font format) and in turn licensed it to Microsoft. They called it TrueType.
With the boom of desktop publishing, digital fonts were originally stored as bitmap font files that specified pixel locations for a font at each particular size. Each font file contains information that describes what characters are in the font. Early versions had to have a separate font for every point size.
Next month: Part II, Font Types and Their Application
The world of Typeface began with the Linotype in 1886. The Linotype was used for generations by newspapers and general printing. It produces a solid line of type. It has a magazine with 90 channels to hold 26 caps, 26 lowercase, 10 numerals, 16 punctuation, and other symbols accessed one key at a time. Compositors used to assemble characters in a composing stick, one piece of metal at a time. The most frequently used characters were closer to the assembling "elevator" and the keyboard was arranged ETAOIN SHRDLU. Early phototypesetter film strips also had 90 characters.
Ninety characters did not prove to be enough, so Pi fonts gave us additional collections of math and other symbols. Pi fonts used to be any font that does not have standard letters for setting text. These days they are commonly called Symbolic fonts. The modern Pi fonts are the fonts with special typographical symbols such as Dingbats or Windings. Compugraphic in the late 1980s developed FAIS, a scalable font format to do battle with Type 1 and Apple’s TrueType. It used rub-down sheets of Pi symbols to supplement their film fonts. It continues to be used inside today's Hewlett Packard laser printers.
In the early 1980s, Adobe teamed with Apple to develop PostScript as a way of displaying type on screen as well as in print. Printer fonts for the Apple LaserWriter were based on PostScript Type 1 outlines, resulting in an excellent output at any size. They also developed Bass (a scalable font format) and in turn licensed it to Microsoft. They called it TrueType.
With the boom of desktop publishing, digital fonts were originally stored as bitmap font files that specified pixel locations for a font at each particular size. Each font file contains information that describes what characters are in the font. Early versions had to have a separate font for every point size.
Next month: Part II, Font Types and Their Application
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