Letraset Technical Manual (1981)
Type faces catalogue, STL Industries Pty Ltd (Melbourne)
A short rant
Adobe Avant Garde first appeared among the LaserWriter Plus ROM fonts
and was released as a font package at about the same time. Interestingly,
ITC had long maintained their library in digital format (URW IKARUS),
which may have greased the wheels of Adobe's early type releases.
(Although at that time, automated conversion from IK to Type 1 would
probably not have been done.)
Unfortunately the Adobe version of Avant Garde differs in many ways
from the original drawing.
- The circular zero
became a lozenge shape because Adobe required, somewhat artificially,
that their fonts have tabular (equal width) digits. (This is, of course, quite the wrong choice
for the bulk of typesetting: headings and running text. Tables are relatively exceptional.)
- Likewise, the alternate sorts and ligatures had no place in the Procrustean AdobeStandardEncoding
to which the Adobe library conformed.
That encoding allows only two ligatures
- fi, fl - which in many Adobe releases were not even authentic!
- The Univers ampersand is another sorry example. Frutiger's original design apparently
had a little too much "character" for the digitising committee,
and it was replaced with a completely different glyph:
In blunders such as these, and many others, Adobe fumbled early opportunities
to bring the full richness of typographic tradition into the PostScript Age.
Instead, the policy was evidently to regularise wherever possible
in shapes, character sets and weights.
No doubt the memory constraints of the earliest interpreters helped
rationalise some compromises. The
software and hardware was designed to handle the saleable bread-and-butter of
office correspondence and fancy word processing - later dubbed "desktop publishing".
These shortcuts did little to convince the graphic arts high-end
that their typographic products paid more than lip service to quality and tradition.
What else is around here
