🚀 go-pugleaf

Vern,

I also responded on that forum to your message. Yes, at the resolution you are talking about and at normal text point sizes, it would be very unlikely that you would see any visible differences.

However, recognize that as digital print takes over much more of what is currently printed via offset, resolutions of 600 to 1200 dpi are much more common. And at such resolutions, depending upon both the point size and the stylistic considerations of the font, you may very well see problems with no hinting ... or as the original thread on the InDesign forum was concerned with, "text outlining" as a means of supposedly getting around font legal embedding restrictions or dealing with anal print service providers.

- Dov

I was always under the impression that hinting applied only to 
on-screen displays, and wasn't used at all when rasterizing to printed 
output, which is assumed to be of high enough resolution that it's not 
needed.

It certainly wouldn't be used if the printer uses fonts' outline 
vectors (as a downloaded font to a postscript printer) and doesn't 
rasterize at all.

Or have I missed something?

  - Herb

You missed something! Hinting is used up until a certain point. And the fonts downloaded in a PostScript stream indeed does have the hinting included within the font. This has been true since the very beginning of PostScript!

- Dov

Yup. What Dov says.

Converting type to outlines will affect rasterization on any device, at all sizes. The difference on an imagesetter at regular text sizes is visible to some exceptionally keen-eyed individuals, though not to most people. For large amounts of text, it may also dramatically increase the time required to image the text.

The affects on rasterization are not only the loss of hinting, but the fact that the "fill algorithm" used for fonts is different than that for graphics, causing the letters to be imaged a little heavier, on average.

Personally, if a font doesn't allow embedding, I won't use it. If an output provider requires me to convert to outlines for some other reason, normally I'd find another output provider. But that's me.

Regards,

T

Thomas Phinney
Product Manager
Fonts & Global Typography

Thanks to Dov and Thomas for removing one more old wives' tale from my 
repertoire!

   - Herb

Actually, to be strictly accurate, there *is* a size at which rendering modes will switch such that there is no difference at all between outlines and text. However, even at 2450 dpi, that size would be letters about half a page high (exact size depends on currently available device memory).

Regards,

T

Thank you. The difference in fill methods is new info and explains quite a bit for me.

Yours
Vern

There are actually 4 different rendering modes for text in our standard PS rasterizer, for different sizes. That's the largest-scale one.

Regards,

T

Which all brings up an interesting point. Traditionally when logotypes, special type-based identifiers, and other fixed-design graphics are created for distribution to clients as part of their corporate ID and marketing programs, and from there, the client's customers, et al, art has been created in Illustrator, and the "final" art uses fonts converted to outlines.

Is providing art as PDFs a "better" way to provide this art? Do you see a downside (other than some end-users possibly being unable to handle PDF graphics for inclusion in their workflows)?

Neil

The issue in this case should not be PDF versus EPS. If a font may be embedded in PDF, it also can be embedded in EPS!

Old traditions die hard. Very old versions of Adobe Illustrator did not provide for embedding fonts in EPS files and as such, if one was creating a "sharable" logo, outlining the text was the only way to produce a self-contained asset. In the general case, since logos tended to be rendered at larger display as opposed to text sizes, the degradation caused by outlining was generally not an issue.

With regards to PDF versus EPS, the issue generally revolves not around what's best for placement in Adobe application documents, but rather, the major problems encountered by users of QuarkXPress when attempting to place PDF. Internally, QuarkXPress converts PDF to EPS with varying levels of "success."

- Dov

Thanks, Dov.

But with Illustrator .eps files, I know that fonts can be embedded (indeed, it is a choice upon saving), but from what I recall, if this is done on the Mac side, the embedded fonts may not "work" on the Windows side.

Is there/was there truth in this?

As for QuarkXPress issues -- I've been slowly weaning myself away from that app. I've got as much as 16 years of legacy XPress files. And, particularly with the more recent files, clients request minor changes; but not enough to merit redoing the files in InDesign. That said, Markzware's plug-in is on my next shopping list.

Neil

No, the embedded fonts in the EPS from a Macintosh will indeed work on the Windows side. Remember that EPS is PostScript and not platform specific; there are no longer the resource fork and data fork issues. For InDesign, the placed EPS is interpreted and the embedded fonts are treated the same as fonts embedded in placed PDF. For QuarkXPress, the EPS including the embedded fonts are simply passed through to its PostScript output.

- Dov

Again, thanks, Dov.

Neil