What's your type? - computer type fonts for laser printers - evaluation

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1986 by Jay Kinney

What's Your Type? By Jay Kinney

(Note: Each paragraph in this article is set in a different typeface available for the LaserWriter.)

The Apple LaserWriter is a grand hunk of hardware. With the aid of a Macintosh and a word processing or page make-up program, the LaserWriter will pump out near-typeset quality text on ordinary bond paper. Even if you can't afford a LaserWriter (and at $5000 list price, most people can't), they are beginning to turn up in local copy shops where they can be rented by the hour. (LaserWriter Times Roman)

Yet the basic LaserWriter has only three built-in text typefaces (Times, Helvetica, and Courier) which are fine for most purposes but begin to pale quickly. (LaserWriter Helvetica)

What to do? A LaserWriter upgrade (to the LaserWriter Plus) adds five or six new built-in faces, but at $875 this is a pricey solution. Adobe Systems, which supplies the fonts for the upgrade, also sells individual "downloadable" typefaces, but these list for $185 per typeface family. These prices are so high for two main reasons: 1) the fonts are of the most painstakingly professional quality imaginable and took hundreds of manhours to create, and 2) Adobe must pay hefty type-licensing royalties to ITC and Mergenthaler -- type corporations whose empires have been built around selling fonts and equipment to commercial typesetters. Yet despite their expense these fonts have distinct virtues that I'll return to shortly. (Adobe ITC Garamond)

The third solution is to go with the independent font suppliers who are rushing in to fill the gap. By crafting their own laser versions of type fonts under nontrademarked names, these software entrepreneurs sidestep the type-licensing fees and provide fonts at far more affordable prices. (Casady San Serif Book)

Casady Company's Fluent Laser Fonts are a strong alternative to Adobe's expensive typefaces. Carefully crafted using Altsys Corporation's Fontographer (a professional laser font development tool that we hope to review next issue), Casady's fonts, such as Bodoni, Regency Script, SansSerif (a Futura clone), etc. care careful renderings of popular commercial typefaces. Perfectionists may note a slight inconsistency of quality from letter to letter in some faces, particularly when using the fonts at the smallest point sizes, but overall these are quite satisfying typefaces at less than half the price of Adobe fonts ($69.95). Six typeface families are currently available, with more in the Works. (Casady Bodoni)

Century Software offers 18 typefaces in their LaserFonts series and has the cheapest prices in the field: $29.95 per font family. Some of these fonts, such as the art decon Hudson (nearly identical to Casady's Ritz) or Potomac (an Optima knock-off), are crisp and well wrought. A number of the others, however, are irregular enough to give an uncanny impression of being hand-lettered. Careful selection is the key here. Happily, two of Century's font-disks are the best bargains around: MicroFonts and Shadow Effects. These disks enable you to run the LaserWriter's built-in fonts in extended, condensed, extra-small, and various shadowed and grey-screened versions. Microfonts alone is almost like tripling your available fonts. (Century Potomac)

Image Club Graphics In Calgary, Alberta, has a broad selection of 16 font families in its LaserType series. These tilt toward modern stylized fonts that are best used for headlines and graphic design. As a whole this is the most imaginative selection of fonts available, and includes such oddball items as typefaces designed to look like chrome bumpers, brass plates, rubber stamps, and brush lettering. At $34.00 each, these fonts are also quite affordable. (image Clube Tipe Thin)

Altsys Corporation, whose Fontographer is the tool of choice for creating many of these new fonts, has also initiated its own Fontographer Font Library of designs from users of its program. As this is being written (October, 1986) their first font is available ($60) -- the one you see in this paragraph -- but there are more in the works. As an added bonus, Altsys fonts will include a copy of the Fontographer files for each font, enabling users to modify and customize the fonts further. (Fontographer Goudy Newstyle)

Whether you stock up on a dozen new fonts or just one or two will depend on your budget and your intentions. If you are just knocking out a modest club newsletter using a Mac and an hour of rented time on someone's LaserWriter, then you may want to acquire a selection of the less expensive, decorative fonts from Century and Image Club. (Century Thin Helvetica)

However, if you are doing professional-quality work where there's little room for imperfections, Adobe and Casady are your best bet. From its smartly designed packaging and documentation down through its impeccable font quality and satisfying selection (21 famous and popular typefaces now available with six new type-families appearing ech quarter), Adobe stands out. Because of their prices, few folks beyond typesetting services or professional shops may be able to afford Adobe's fonts, which is a shame. Adobe's other drawback is their copy-protection scheme, which narrows use of the fonts to a single chosen printer. If you use a LaserWriter for preliminary proofs and a sharper Allied Linotronic for final typeset printouts, you have no choice but to pay an extra $190 to Adobe for a multi-printer version of each font. None of the other font companies use copy protection of this sort (though Casady does charge another $20 per extra printer used). (Adobe Trump Mediaeval)