🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1227@adobe.UUCP> bezanson@adobe.UUCP (Brian Bezanson) writes:
>In article <5516@wiley.UUCP> david@wiley.UUCP (David Hull) writes:
>>I have a question.  I've heard that Adobe Type Manager (ATM) only comes
>>with outline versions of Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol.  What
>>about Palatino, Bookman, Century Schoolbook, Avant Garde, Zapf
>>Chancery, and Zapf Dingbats?  
>
>We will also have a "Plus Pack" of fonts for $199 that include the rest
>of the Plus faces. Why do we charge for it?
>	1) Not all PostScript printers used by Mac people have those faces.
>	   This starts with the original LaserWriter, and goes to many of
>	   our newer OEMs. We also sell the faces as type packages 1-5 for
>	   these other users (normally ~$985 for the five).

Oh, come now.  Almost every LaserWriter in existence that I know of
has been upgraded to a Plus.  At this point, people expect to have
Palatino, Bookman, etc. available *at a minimum*.

>	2) You bought the original faces from your OEM (I know they licensed
>	   them from Adobe), but...
>	3) Several fixes have been incorporated into the outlines - you won't
>	   have these in the ROM versions. Also, the LaserWriter Plus and
>	   later Apple printers had missing characters in some of the ISO-
>	   latins because of lack of ROM space - the outlines we sell don't
>	   have those limitations.

This is a basically a non-issue as far as most Mac users are
concerned.  It just isn't worth $200 to get a few extra random
characters.

>I wish we could offer them for a give away price, but they are a product we
>still sell. Giving them away wouldn't be good for business. Hope that makes
>the explanation clearer.

But seriously, what Mac user would want to buy downloadable versions
of these fonts?  If you are someone with an archaic original
LaserWriter, you're much better off spending the money to upgrade the
ROMS in your printer, where the fonts won't take up disk space or have
to be painfully downloaded when you print.  I can't imagine that Adobe
is making much money selling these fonts to Mac users.  So what does
it cost them to essentially give them away with the ATM?  

I would hope that ATM is more than a cheesy attempt to get people to
shell out $200 to be able to use fonts that they already use for free
on regular basis.

Also, I wish Adobe would stop saying that there are "13 fonts"
included with ATM.  It almost sounds like Adobe is trying to imply
that the whole LaserWriter Plus set is included.  Let's get real; it's
four (4) fonts, with stylistic variations.  Now, I know we can argue
about what technically a "font" is, but let's be realistic: to the
general public, the concept of a "font" is "Palatino" vs.
"Helvetica", not "Times Slanted Bold Oblique" vs. "Times Bold
Condensed Rotated" or what-have-you.

If Adobe really wants ATM to take off, they should bite the bullet and
just include the entire LaserWriter Plus font set.  ATM has the
potential to be a real breakthrough product; why threaten this by
being needlessly stingy with the included fonts?

----
Mark Vita                              vita@crd.ge.com
General Electric CRD               	..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita
Schenectady, NY