THE APPLICATION FORMERLY KNOWN AS...

摘要

It was ten years ago this summer when I helped a client, a small monthly print magazine, bring their desktop publishing operation in house. At the time, the operating system (Mac OS 7.1) and the hardware (Quadra 840av) were very different than today, but two key components of the solution still remain in place for my client and other publishers: QuarkXpress for the layout of the publication, and Adobe Type 1 fonts for the typefaces. The initial project had some typographical obstacles including body text that borrowed capital letters from other fonts for use with the main typeface, and some other elements from disparate fonts, including asterisks and dashes within the body text. These peculiarities made the cost of laying out the magazine quite high, since the typographers either had to search and replace the characters every month, or change the selected font as they typed the text. So, while planning the project, I proposed that they edit their font (Bembo) to accommodate the capital letters from other fonts, the dashes, and the asterisks so that they would appear naturally within the body copy while a typesetter was entering text. At the time, it was also clear which tool was appropriate for the customizing the typeface: Altsys Fontographer (now owned by Macromedia, and still available for purchase but never updated to be a native OS X application). The client purchased Fontographer; I went ahead and modified the font for them, and they adopted the Mac for their desktop publishing (and have been a Mac company ever since), eventually leaving behind dbase for their circulation database and moving to FileMaker. The resulting font, called "SpecialText" proved to be a great solution, as they migrated from Mac OS 7 to 8, and 9, and even OS X in mid-2003.