Jon Pepper
A trio of new products make it easier to manage, generate, and manipulate fonts on your PC. And, to varying degrees, these products attempt to solve the problem of document portability (i.e., maintaining the original design when sharing documents among multiple users).
The most well-known of these new products is Adobe Type Manager for Windows, the font-rasterizer program from Adobe Systems ((415) 961-4400) that converts an outline font into a pattern of dots for imaging on a raster device, such as a monitor or a printer. Version 3.0 maintains all that is good from the ubiquitous prior releases, including superb on-the-fly rendering of screen and printer fonts. Version 3.0 also adds support for Adobe's Multiple Master technology, which had previously
been available only on the Mac, and network font sharing.
Multiple Master fonts let you generate thousands of font variations for a single Multiple Master typeface. ATM 3.0 has simple controls that let you adjust any element of a Multiple Master font (e.g., weight, width, style, and optical size), creating a customized design as needed. One Multiple Master font is included with the 30 fonts that ship with ATM 3.0. What you don't get is the ability to do font substitution, a feature included in SuperATM on the Mac and slated for a future update under Windows.
Font substitution is at the heart of FontWorks from ElseWare ((206) 448-9600). When you open a document, FontWorks' sophisticated Panose type-matching system will find the closest visual replacement from among the 150 TrueType fonts included with FontWorks. The font is then instantly generated by the software. The font library takes up just 2 MB of disk space, making this program a great solution for mobile computing users.
The third
product, FontChameleon from Ares ((415) 578-9090), has a single master font outline and descriptors of more than 200 popular fonts that can be generated on-the-fly in TrueType or Type 1 formats. FontChameleon lets you adjust the width, height, and other aspects of a font; blend two fonts into a totally new design; and otherwise slice and dice the type to your heart's desire. FontChameleon is frugal with its disk space (a description file for a font takes up about 5 KB) and works cross-platform on Windows or the Mac. It's the most expensive of these products but offers more benefits to professional designers.
Table: Font Wrap-Up (This table is not available electronically. Please see July, 1994, issue.)
Three Programs Help Manage, Create Fonts
