#Type 1 Specs
Jon,
When I was at Seybold, I attended the meeting of the SPS Association
(PostScript standards group). Mike Parker from the The Company, which is the US
company which handles URW fonts and font technology, spoke on font developments
in PostScript. When referring to the Royal fonts, he said that they were
constructed with "three levels" of quality. Level 1 provided hinting analogous
to that provided by Adobe with its Type 1 fonts. Level 2 provided "outline
manipulation" to make sure the display of fonts "looked nice." He said this is
analagous to what Adobe does with its ATM fill routines. Level 3 is something
not provided by Adobe in its PostScript fonts. It is a complete font
manipulation language. Apparently this could be used by a font vendor to
produce (among other things) size-specific features.
Again, quoting from my notes from Parker's talk, font vendors don't have to use
all three levels of Royal font technology. They can choose to implement the
ones they want to. And output devices don't have to use all three levels. Level
3 would only take effect if: (1) the font vendor put such information into
their fonts and (2) the output device (screen, printer) was set up to use it.
Otherwise the output would fall back to the simpler levels.
I hope haven't mangled his ideas too much. I'm doing this from notes I took two
weeks ago.
^Steve^