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Mac Fonts Getting Better? Not

August 22, 2008 In a earleir blog we talked about how frustating using many fonts on the Mac can be. Adding to this frustration was the hope and promise that when the Mac OS went through its greatest evolution to OSX that many of these problems would disappear.

• There was the dreaded font id conflict. If two fonts had the same font id number one would be randomly assigned a new number just for that machine.

• There was talk that the jaggied screen font issues would disappear. In OS X, antialiasing qualities are built-in, so there's no need for a separate application to make PostScript fonts appear properly on screen. In addition, Adobe talked abou how it was discontinuing ATM (Adobe Type manager) but that it licensed the ATM code to Apple for inclusion in the new OS.

• Apple created a font management tool called Font Panel that was supposed to help overcome font issues and a new font format called dfont which was designed to overcome cross platform issues meaning when files go back and forth between macs and PCs.

But as so often happens in our computer driven worlds while some problems have been solved new ones have been created.

Posted by Howie Fenton on August 22, 2008 | Comments (4)