One of the biggest problems in desktop publishing is that to archive a finished newsletter or whatever takes up an entire floppy disk for one issue – and it’s even worse if you want to squirt the thing down the wire for someone else to print out. An ingenious approach to handling fonts and type-faces was unveiled last week that is claimed radically to reduce storage requirements, simplify portability and enable users to design their own fonts. Boston-based Ares Software Corp is hoping to licence its FontChameleon technology to operating system designers, application developers and printer manufacturers, and it may have some success since FontChameleon is supposedly compatible with existing PostScript and TrueType standards. Conventionally, each font is encoded from scratch, to produce a file anywhere between 30Kb or 50Kb. FontChameleon takes a radically different approach: a master outline file about 200Kb in size stores generic descriptions of characters, digits and punctuation marks. This information base is then manipulated using a font descriptor file to generate a particular font. The beauty is that the font descriptor files take up only 2Kb, so once the intial overhead has been recouped, adding fonts is relatively painless. The 200Kb master file covers only Roman faces – italic fonts need another file, bringing the overhead to 400Kb. Nonetheless Ares believes that for users with even a moderate number of typefaces in use, FontChameleon will save storage space. The technology should also help users move documents around since it will enable fonts to be ’embedded’ in text files more easily. Moreover the company claims that FontChameleon can read the metrics from TrueType and PostScript Type One and Three fonts; so if the user receives a document containing a font that he or she does not have, the intelligent Ares software will be able to construct a close match. There are limitations of course – dingbats and other specialised marks cannot be generated from the master file and will have to be stored conventionally. Additionally, there is a slight degradation in the quality of the letters compared with those indvidually generated from scratch. However Ares’ Chairman Rob Friedman says that this will be noticeable only by the typographic elite and that the output is more than acceptable for most publishing applications. Ares hopes to sell the technology through a variety of channels – most obvious, lucrative and difficult will be persuading an operating system manufacturer to incorporate the code into its offering, however the company also hopes to tempt printer manufacturers with the prospect of shipping more ROM-held fonts, or alternatively cut their memory requirements. In the meantime the company is concentrating on application software for the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh and Microsoft Corp Windows machines which enables users to construct their own fonts. This should be ready by the middle of the year and cost $300. It will ship with 200 fonts bundled in, and users will be able to use the tool to combine the characteristics of these to generate new fonts that can be saved in either PostScript or TrueType format.
