🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <844@sahiways.gov.au>, peters@sahiways.gov.au writes:
> I can see Apple will continue to push Royal font technology, mainly due to
> their pig-headedness.  Apple should have switched to Display PostScript aeons
> ago, relegating QuickDraw to the background for compatibility's sake.

Well, this would be great given infinite memory and processor power.  Running
Display PostScript on a 2MB Macintosh SE would be overkill for most purposes.
It seems to me that both Apple and Adobe have factored out the most useful
(to most people) feature of PostScript and allowed it to stand on its own,
which I would argue is even more useful than trying to run DPS on everything.

I'd love to see DPS on a Mac (I drool over it every year at MacWorld :-)),
but there are very very few universal solutions. 

> Unfortunately for Apple, Adobe's Type Manager came out first.  It has some
> advantages over Royal:
> 1) it works on all Macs, NOW.  We don't have to wait for System 7.
> 2) it works with 99.9% of the existing PostScript fonts.
> 3) it works with heaps of non-Apple and non-PostScript printers
> 4) users have the choice of turning it off when necessary

I see Royal and ATM as complementary, not as competitive.  Royal has
several advantages over ATM already:

1) It is docuemented, NOW.  Granted, details may change slightly by the
   time System 7 hits the streets, but Apple has put their money where
   their manual is and published the prelminary specs for the font format.
   We're still waiting for Adobe to platy catch-up on this one.

2) Speed.  All the reports from people who have seen the Royal fonts in
   action are that it is quite amazingly faster than using ATM.

3) Flexibility.  Royal allows the specification of higher-level formatting
   information, such as ligatures, contextual forms, malleable forms, and
   so on.  Very useful for international applications in particular.

Adobe spokespeople have said publically that they will make ATM compatible
with System 7.0 once it becomes available.  Goven that, why not use both
of them?  ATM for fonts from Adobe, and Royal for fonts from Apple?

I mean, just because we have an email connection doesn't mean we've thrown
out our FAX machine...

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
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