laser-lovers@uw-beaver (06/04/85)
From: Les Earnest <LES@SU-AI.ARPA> [Response to Chris Torek's message of 31 May 85 20:54:36 edt & J Q Johnson's message of 1 Jun 85 06:41:13 edt] Chris and J Q: First let me make it clear again that I no longer work for Imagen. They are not responsible for me (please, no cheers) nor am I responsible for them. Now when J Q states, in support of Chris's remark, that > I think you should also accept responsibility for the fonts that you > have in the past distributed in ROM on your machines. I must point out that the fonts that Chris is talking about are not in ROM. The Imprint-10 does have a few fonts in ROM: a lineprinter font in a couple of sizes and a Courier-like font for daisy emulation, but the Computer Modern fonts used in TeX, troff, and Scribe are all host-resident. Internal fonts for 8/300 reside on a floppy, but also do not yet include the Computer Modern font family. For the record, Imagen began business as an image processor/laser printer company. It was not in the font business. The tasks of laser printer financing, marketing, sales, firmware development, computer manufacturing, installation, and support were an adequate challenge for its staff of one employee and up to 3.5 consultants for the first year and a quarter. It was also clear that users needed fonts. Fortunately, a reasonable set had previously been placed in the public domain through the generosity of Don Knuth at Stanford. Early laser printer users (and Imagen) benefitted greatly from the availability of those fonts at a time when there were very few alternatives. Imagen supplied each customer with several hundred Computer Modern fonts on tape at no charge. Inasmuch as Imagen placed no restrictions on the use of the fonts they distributed, many of them found their way into the libraries of other vendors. Imagen customers were also given troff and TeX interfacing software on a "no charge - no support" basis, but we learned that people always think that anything they get should be supported, even if they haven't paid for it. By 1983, when Imagen had a number of employees and everyone was being paid regularly, it became clear that it would be a good idea to get into the font business. I started planning a font development program and recruiting a staff. This effort was greatly aided by the management of Autologic, whose personnel policies unintentionally made it possible to recruit a number of very talented people from their typography group over the next year. Of course, it is not possible to instantly enter the font production business. The main alternatives were, and still are, to spend a lot of money for an inadequate development system and then figure out how to adapt it to your problem, or to develop your own inadequate system and do enough tuning to get it to work. We chose the latter route. As a kind of gap-filler, we swapped some hardware for access to a set of sans-serif fonts. They were readable but not excessively beautiful and were sold on tape under the name "Zurich." Now, some 20 months later, the Imagen font development program is beginning to bear fruit. Not a moment too soon, it seems. About those old Computer Modern fonts that you are still using, I am sorry that you don't like some of them, but they have served many people honorably and well. In fact, there was a time when almost everyone thought they looked pretty spiffy. Indeed, nearly all laser printer output was well regarded then, perhaps because most people were used to reading line printer output. Standards change. So do companies. Cheers, Les Earnest Stanford