#Varityper
I thought you might be interested in this quote from an excellent new book,
Real World PostScript, just out, regarding Adobe's "hints". (Edited by
Stephen F. Roth, Addison Wesley, 1988). It's from an essay, "Building Smart
Fonts" by Michael Mace (founder of Century Software).
"So how does Adobe do it? Does the company have 'that special Adobe font
magic' (as one employee put it)? Actually there's no magic involved, but
there is a fair amount of obfuscation. Adobe's fonts are not outlines;
they're algorithms.
"The details of Adobe's system are secret, but apparently their fonts use
an outline that mathematically modifies itself, depending on the font size
and printer resolution, to fit the pixel grid perfectly….
[Mace then produces an algorithm to do the same thing, but says the
resulting outline is bulky to store and slow to execute.]
"How slow? An algorithm much like this one doubles the print time of a font
I tested it on. Adobe's fonts are speedy in part because they are written
in assembly language, not PostScript. They can thus access the processor
very efficiently, allowing them to do more calculation than any third-party
font could."
He concludes: "What the world is waiting for is a computer whiz to cook up
an algorithm that executes quickly and can be applied automatically by a
program like Fontographer. Then we'd be talking about PostScript's font
magic, not just Adobe's."