#SEYBOLD
At the New York PostScript User's Group meeting on Monday night, the two
Adobe reps said they had no word on SPS membership. I keep getting the
feeling that Adobe feels that if it throws open the full specifications on
PostScript that everyone will feel so grateful that they'll allow Adobe to
continue to define the standard. The rep said Adobe hopes to use its
developers' conferences as places to discuss and define new specs for the
language. Hopefully, they'll realize how important it is in light of the
Apple/MS alliance that the PostScript world speak with one voice and get on
the SPS bandwagon.
The worse case scenerio: a world with Adobe-defined PostScript, SPS-defined
extensions, MS/Apple-defined PostScript clone and the Royal font rendering
technology. That prospect was making several service bureau managers
shudder a bit.
Lot of questions raised. Will Apple continue to issue and administer the
NFNT numbers? Will Apple customers let Apple back off from its earlier
statement that it would develop a utility to convert Royal fonts to
PostScript (which they reneged from at Seybold)? Will Adobe fill that void,
since the Royal font technology will supposedly be open?
Hang on to your hats, folks, the next few months could be bumpy.