vita@daredevil.crd.ge.com (09/27/89)
Well, I've been following the "font war" hubbub in the trade rags, and I've seen the press releases put out by Apple and Adobe here on the net this week, and I must say that I'm intrigued by all the maneuvering that's gone on lately. For those of you who may have missed it: Apple and Microsoft announced a deal whereby Apple will license their new Royal outline font technology to Microsoft for incorporation into OS/2. In an apparent response, Adobe announced that it would be publishing the specs for its Type 1 font format (which includes encryption and hinting), making it an "open" format, so that any type vendor will be able to produce Type 1 Postscript fonts without paying any licensing fees to Adobe. My first thought was to wonder why Apple would seemingly give away the candy store to Microsoft by allowing them to incorporate Royal into OS/2. I'm at somewhat of a loss to explain why Apple would surrender their apparent technological lead in this area to their biggest competitor. What's in it for Apple? Not much that I can see. In exchange for letting Microsoft have Royal, Apple gets the rights to some Postscript clone interpreter that Microsoft acquired a while back. Big deal; everybody and his sister has a Postscript clone under development these days. One article claimed that the move was good for Apple because it would make Royal the undisputed "industry standard" font technology. I find this explanation hard to swallow; in the past, Apple has certainly not been concerned with making their proprietary technology into "industry standards" (and in fact has often resorted to legal means to prevent this from happening :-). One possible explanation is that Apple was concerned that unless they made such a move, type vendors would not convert their fonts to Apple's format. However, if we are to believe Apple's early press about Royal, as of several weeks ago, they already had most of the major type vendors signed up. I can only speculate that there must be some hidden benefit to Apple that has not yet been revealed. Maybe they are really making a killing on the licensing fees. Maybe the sequence of events was different from what has been described; perhaps Apple found out that Adobe was going to open their format, and decided that they better make some move to insure that the type vendors continued to support Royal. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that this is the first time I can recall Apple licensing technology that they have invented to be run on non-Apple platforms. I mean, what's next? Licensing the Mac ROMS to the Taiwanese? :-) (no, probably not...) The conventional wisdom seems to be that Adobe is the big loser in all this, that their sudden religion about "open formats" is evidence that they are running scared, and that this is a desperate move to maintain some sort of visibility in the market. However, I'm not so sure Adobe should be written off so quickly. Now that they have opened their format up, they could present a serious challenge to the Apple/Microsoft strategy. After all, Postscript has been around for a long time, and there is a large installed base of Adobe fonts; Royal, on the other hand, won't be released for some time. On the other hand, if we all chose technologies based on installed base, we'd all be using IBMs right now :-). I must say that overall Adobe president John Warnock did not come across well. I mean, I can see where he might be a bit frustrated, but his comments in the press were downright petulant. He was reduced to tearing down Royal, ranting about obscure technical issues, and calling the whole deal "the biggest bunch of garbage mumbo jumbo I've ever heard in my life." Overall, industry reaction to the announcements was mixed, with the various partisans reacting fairly predictably (i.e. Steve Jobs calling Royal a "big mistake"). Type vendors (Bitstream, Linotype) seem willing to support all of the formats. Perhaps most surprising was Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems rising to the defense of Adobe. Infoworld explained this by saying "Sun uses News [sic], which is its own extension of Display Postscript." Of course, NeWS has nothing to do with Display Postscript, and in fact, existed long before DPS. From what I hear, Adobe is not very pleased about NeWS (perhaps because Sun conceived and implemented Postscript as a display language before they did :-), and as Adobe is so fond of pointing out, "NeWS is not Postscript (sniff)." And, of course, Sun has their own outline font technology to promote (Folio). So what's the scoop? Has Microsoft once again (legally) robbed Apple of innovative technology that they could not invent themselves? Will Adobe's move throw a monkey wrench into the works? What will IBM think about incorporating technology from arch-rival Apple into OS/2? What's the angle for Apple in all this? Well, I've rambled long enough... what does everyone make of all this? (Anybody from Apple and/or Adobe care to comment?) ---- Mark Vita vita@crd.ge.com General Electric CRD ..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita Schenectady, NY
bmug@garnet.berkeley.edu (BMUG) (09/28/89)
In article <2560@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> vita@daredevil.crd.ge.com () writes (among other things): > > >One article claimed that the move was good for Apple because it would >make Royal the undisputed "industry standard" font technology. I find >this explanation hard to swallow; in the past, Apple has certainly not >been concerned with making their proprietary technology into "industry >standards" (and in fact has often resorted to legal means to prevent >this from happening :-). The main advantage to Apple in all this is that they have the chance to make their font imaging model an industry standard. As an industry standard, they can be assured that Linotype, Compugraphic, and everyone else with raster image processors will continue to support output from Apple machines. Although this was also the case with PostScript, Apple preferred to control the technology which controls the screen display, and, now, printed output. The main challenge to Apple (especially if IBM gets involved in endorsing the Royal format) is remaining technologically ahead of the others to a degree sufficient to ensure that the format remains under their control. John Heckendorn /\ BMUG ARPA: bmug@garnet.berkeley.EDU A__A 1442A Walnut St., #62 BITNET: bmug@ucbgarne |()| Berkeley, CA 94709 Phone: (415) 549-2684 | |
gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (09/28/89)
Re: Apple licensing font technology to Microsoft; Adobe out in cold I think this is great. Adobe was founded to release proprietary technology to the world (Postscript was a redesign of Xerox's then-proprietary Interpress language). But Adobe, you couldn't quite keep your hands out of the cookie jar, could you? You had to make just one *little* *teeny* part of postscript proprietary? You had to make font storage proprietary, didn't you? Eat your proprietary products, Adobe..... The party's over! Kudos go to Apple for making Adobe eat proprietary pie.
dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams) (10/03/89)
> My first thought was to wonder why Apple would seemingly give away the > candy store to Microsoft by allowing them to incorporate Royal into > OS/2. My first thought was to wonder how much Adobe stock was being sold short. > Type vendors (Bitstream, Linotype) seem willing to support all of the > formats. I read that Bitstream is doing a Postscript to Royal conversion program. How many people are going to want Adobe Type Manager after that? -Duane -- uucp: ...!cmucspt!me.ri.cmu.edu!dtw arpa: dtw@cs.cmu.edu