And this seems like yet another good reason to drop Adobe.
I want things I author to be archival, not ephemeral.
* Dropping Flash? Good idea. Dropping Flash with no compatibility/emulation path? Bad idea.
* Switching to license servers from owning software? Bad idea.
And so on. I like the things I do, and I like many of thing things I did 35 years ago too. I'd be sad to see them dead. At the end of the day, I'm willing to take a productivity hit to ensure that if I do create something really good, it's eternal.
Even in retirement, someday, I won't expect to be able to afford the Adobe tax. Do I want my creative work disappearing? No.
There are certain file formats that are explicitly designed to be archival safe, like PDF/A. For long term stability, I always try to export a copy to one of those.
File formats like .doc or .psd that are tied to evolving product lines are bound to change eventually. They're great for working copies, but I don't expect those file formats to still be readable in 10-20 years. Unless the file format explicitly calls out long-term archival as a feature, I assume a PM will eventually change the file format and break things.
You can still read doc files from 20 years ago. Microsoft is very good at keeping backwards compatibility. I would be surprised if they decide to change course and start breaking things.
It's a tough problem. The original Microsoft Word file format wasn't even really a file format in the way that modern developers think. It was basically just a dump of raw memory blocks to disk, with the necessary adjustments to pointers between blocks. That made it very fast to save and load files on old hardware. But using such formats with modern code bases is extremely difficult and error prone, even if you have all the original source code.
I get your sentiment, but what Adobe does is of almost no consequence to the rest of the world. Type 1 fonts can never go away, and are required to be implemented in one form or another.
For example, the actual outlines (once losslessly transformed into CFF/Type 2) are required to be supported by any OpenType-speaking rasterization engine until the end of time; this is as per ISO/IEC 14496-22 aka MPEG4 Part 22, a specification that is mostly Microsoft contributions, building on top of Apple's TrueType font specification (which was also adopted by Microsoft circa Windows 3.1). Adobe's only contribution to any of this was providing Type 1/Type 2 glyph support (which was already standardized as ISO 9541).
Adobe's proposed replacement, which never was adopted, is Type 3: Type 1/2 fonts, but with the full power of Postscript to manage the actual rendering (as to do hand-tuned hinting, and such). This was designed to be a push into display-oriented fonts, instead of only having a font format that is optimal for print...
Except TrueType hinting already has existed for 30 years, and hand-hinting is falling out of fashion as 200%+ DPI is becoming the norm. In the future, we're just going to go back to grayscale AA, no hand-hinting at 9-14px ranges, no subpixel rendering, and at this scale hinting at all has a negligible effect.
Type 3 is not supported by OpenType's OTF or by WOFF, yet I can transform existing Type 1 formats (of which there are several) into OTF or WOFF, and continue using them with Freetype, DirectWrite, OSX's renderer, and in all major web browsers, with their glyphs exactly as intended by the original artist.
People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author fonts. They are not the best in class, and also produce fonts that don't comply with the relevant specifications.
People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author PDFs. They are not the best in class, and also produce PDFs that don't comply with the relevant specifications.
I can repeat this statement for basically everything Adobe makes: of formats they invented, they don't comply with their own specification while everyone else does, and there is a better domain-specific tool out there that replaces the use of them.
The only counter-example in Adobe's entire portfolio is Photoshop: it's not great at every specific use, but its the swiss army chainsaw of raster image manipulation; there's several better tools that do a specific task much better, but nobody has been idiotic enough to produce a tool that does all of them mediocrely at the same time.
> nobody has been idiotic enough to produce a tool that does all of them mediocrely at the same time
Nothing wrong with (GIMP, Affinity Photo, PaintShop Pro, Pixelmator Pro, etc.) but since Photoshop is subscription-only I went all in and have replaced it in all of my workflows with the obvious superior alternative: Microsoft Paint.
Apple and Microsoft have also been removing support for PostScript fonts, so this is not just Adobe making this move. The entire tech industry is moving away from this old tech. I won't be surprised if support for EPS files (embedded postscript) gets dropped eventually.
Uhhh, Adobe has almost unprecedented backwards compatibility.
I also dropped Adobe for Affinity because of price, but frankly, your reaction is not warranted for this news... good luck opening 35 year old Photoshop file with anything else than Photoshop.
That would be their fault - they intentionally provide an incomplete specification for their proprietary formats. It is a compatibility nightmare - there is no telling what kind of corruption or information loss an older version of the software will introduce when dealing with a file produced by a subsequent release, as there are no well defined specs to guarantee forward compatibility. Of course... you could just use an open standard file format and skip all the pain on display in Adobe's forums.
Tex has unprecedented backwards-compatibility. Microsoft does pretty well too. Adobe is a mixed bag. Calling it "almost unprecedented" is simply dishonest.
My 30-year-old Photoshop files used PostScript fonts. Even multiple master fonts, which don't have the same broad support as mainstream PS fonts.
Good luck opening them with Photoshop.
Truth be told, most of my 30-year-old files are in PageMaker.
InDesign has some support for them for a while, but dropped support. Adobe's official line is "Open the PageMaker files in Indesign CS6 or an earlier version first, and then save them to native Indesign Format (.indd ). Once the files are saved in InDesign format, Indesign can open the files."
Of course, Adobe won't sell you old versions of InDesign to do that with, so YMMV.
I dropped Adobe for Affinity not so much for price, but because I can buy the software and use it forever. Even when I retire. I still have an Adobe subscription (paid for by someone else), but I don't use it.
Wow, you have a good memory! (Not being sarcastic.)
That was my product, and I got in a lot of trouble for it.
ATM allowed you to use Adobe's scalable fonts in Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 did not have scalable fonts at all, only bitmap fonts that turned blocky if you asked for a font size that wasn't present. Windows 3.1 added scalable TrueType fonts, but it still didn't support Adobe Type 1 fonts.
The way I made it work was to patch into the API calls for font rendering, check that it was an Adobe font, and then call Adobe's font renderer instead of the one in Windows.
Some lawyer at Microsoft found out that I'd patched into these calls, and sent a letter to Adobe co-founder John Warnock that said the only way I could have accomplished it was by stealing the Windows source code.
Actually it was something that any reasonably talented Windows programmer of the day could figure out - anyone who knew about LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress could do it.
But why let facts get in the way when Adobe and Microsoft were feuding about other things and there was a chance to get an innocent programmer caught in the middle of that fight?
It all got sorted out in the end when we proved that it didn't take Windows source code to figure this out.
The one thing that stung was that Microsoft never did have the decency to apologize for falsely maligning my reputation.
Yeah, that was a different product with the same name. The ATM I worked on was a low level font rendering utility. It became obsolete in a few years as Windows evolved to include a formal font driver interface, so Adobe repurposed the name for a font management tool.
I'm a little fuzzy on those details, but I seem to recall that there was a problem with having too many fonts available at the same time. (Memory limitations?) So this new Adobe Type Manager let you select a subset of your fonts to be available at any given time.
Up to Windows XP, having many additional fonts registered notably increased system boot time. It silently did full font enumeration on start, like fontconfig without cache does. That's at least one problem.
Do they not understand that designers, and especially publishers, have projects that go on and need to still be editable for years and years? I have dozens of books on backlist from past decades with type 1 fonts. Some day I might want to do another printing run, in which case I need to be able to open them and edit the copyright page and fix typos and so on. Preferably when I do this I don't discover that the whole thing needs to be retypeset. Graphic designers must exist in the same position.
Surely that is a takeaway here: Open standards, open formats, open source. And maybe "not Adobe" for good measure;) Nobody ever will - or can truly kill groff support for something; even if it were removed from the (many) implementations, you can just build an old checkout and be back in business.
My father-in-law has run into exactly this problem - documents he started working on in an earlier version of Word with Adobe Caslon are now no longer editable or printable because the new Caslon doesn't have the private codepage ligatures that he used. He's working on transcribing original prints from more than 100 years ago which used ligatures throughout.
It's very frustrating to have to go back and fix things that were done the correct idiomatic way at the time.
Why doesn't he just use the version of Caslon he started with? He must still have a copy of it embedded in the original document or on a disk somewhere no?
To ask the obvious, has he tried to convert the old fonts to OpenType? There are various free and proprietary tools to do that and Private Unicode Area ranges still exist.
To install a Type 1 font on Windows, you must have the .PFM file that normally accompanies the font's .PFB file and should be in the same directory as the .PFB file. You right click on the .PFM file and select Install.
Nice shout out for Albertus there. This is a typeface I recommend reserving for use as an occasional decorative font, especially for map titles, or for signage. The utility is social, being a signal to others, in particular a secret order of iconoclasts possessing great taste in mid-century British avant-garde allegorical television; they will respond in kind, and these are people you can trust.
Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time. Digital encoding is fundamentally a way to avoid entropy's inexorable erosive effects. Hardware will eventually fail, but software is deterministic.
This means that software can reach a state where known bugs have been fixed and the desired features have been implemented. Such software is de facto "finished". It doesn't need regular development and maintenance; it will continue working indefinitely for the same reason 2 + 2 will still be 4 in the future. Bryan Cantrill once explained[1]
>> software does not wear out. That isn’t to say that software never breaks (or isn’t broken to begin with), but software that works can work in perpetuity. A favorite example of mine is troff. The source for troff is some of the nastiest stuff ever written — but it works. It hasn’t been touched in years, and probably will never be: it’s written in a portable language (C) and relies only on the most basic OS facilities. troff will work indefinitely — it will never wear out.
>> (The tragic footnote to troff is that its author, Joseph Ossanna, died tragically in 1977; the very fact that his software is humming along perfectly more than a quarter of a decade after his death is a testament to software’s unique imperviousness to wear.)
Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old. Throwing away software that works is also throwing away decades of bugfixes and experience.
Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero. Removing support would have been more expensive: it required paying devs/testers/etc to implement the change. This is simply an attempt to push people onto other formats. Why should Adobe care how much this breaks? They don't have to pay the cost of updating an old projects.
But even if the software is finished, Adobe has the problem of supporting it in each new version of its multiple applications. I think their goal here is to cut down on backwards maintenance costs. After all, you can continue to use Type1 fonts with existing software, as you mention.
> After all, you can continue to use Type1 fonts with existing software, as you mention.
The thing you miss is that according to the parent, every piece of old software is useful and finished, except the ones they want the latest updates on. /s
> Software has a significant advantage over things that have to be made in the real world: it doesn't degrade over time.
That's the conventional wisdom, but actually it's wrong in every possible sense. Software is an inseparable part of its ecosystem, and the ecosystem is always evolving.
Decay is not a property of the physical world. It's a property of complex systems in general, be it natural or artificial.
> Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old.
> Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero.
By your own logic, you can just stick to using old Adobe software. Problem solved.
And you're wrong about Type 1 support being "finished". Given Type 1 isn't supported by any recent OS (and never was on mobile OS), it basically is a feature on its own, that has to be extended and maintained every time the software wants to make use of a new OS level font support feature, because both need to have parity.
Adobe stopped supporting it because the de-facto standard today is OpenType. Adobe doesn't want to "push" anyone to OpenType. It has no financial incentive to.
So you basically spun a conspiracy theory that is wrong in all possible ways at once.
This is just super lame. But thankfully nobody actually NEEDS Adobe any more. What’s Adobe done that’s relevant since the PDF format came out anyhow? Kind wondering…
Thanks Adobe. The Type 1 font collection I have after spending thousands of dollars on your Font Folio product still work fine... Can I switch them for non Type 1 fonts?
In practice, isn't it trivial to convert Type 1 fonts to OpenType?
After all, OpenType fonts are really just a fancy container with lots of features that ultimately contain font data as either Type 1 or TrueType description.
Sure you need a conversion tool, but it should be a lossless conversion as well, no?
So this doesn't seem like any kind of problem in practice. (Really Adobe ought to provide a conversion tool free of charge though.)
I mean, current Microsoft Word can't open Word 4.0 files back from 1989. At some point after decades, ancient file formats ought to be deprecated and it's up to users to convert to more modern formats.
And yes I understand this might technically be against a license agreement. But I really don't think any of the font foundries are going to go after you over a shrinkwrap license from a quarter century ago. And even if they did, you'd probably have a pretty good argument around fair use or something -- just because something's in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable.
46 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadI want things I author to be archival, not ephemeral.
* Dropping Flash? Good idea. Dropping Flash with no compatibility/emulation path? Bad idea.
* Switching to license servers from owning software? Bad idea.
And so on. I like the things I do, and I like many of thing things I did 35 years ago too. I'd be sad to see them dead. At the end of the day, I'm willing to take a productivity hit to ensure that if I do create something really good, it's eternal.
Even in retirement, someday, I won't expect to be able to afford the Adobe tax. Do I want my creative work disappearing? No.
File formats like .doc or .psd that are tied to evolving product lines are bound to change eventually. They're great for working copies, but I don't expect those file formats to still be readable in 10-20 years. Unless the file format explicitly calls out long-term archival as a feature, I assume a PM will eventually change the file format and break things.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
I've seen documents written in some version of Microsoft Word that were noticably broken when read into a later version of Microsoft Word.
For example, the actual outlines (once losslessly transformed into CFF/Type 2) are required to be supported by any OpenType-speaking rasterization engine until the end of time; this is as per ISO/IEC 14496-22 aka MPEG4 Part 22, a specification that is mostly Microsoft contributions, building on top of Apple's TrueType font specification (which was also adopted by Microsoft circa Windows 3.1). Adobe's only contribution to any of this was providing Type 1/Type 2 glyph support (which was already standardized as ISO 9541).
Adobe's proposed replacement, which never was adopted, is Type 3: Type 1/2 fonts, but with the full power of Postscript to manage the actual rendering (as to do hand-tuned hinting, and such). This was designed to be a push into display-oriented fonts, instead of only having a font format that is optimal for print...
Except TrueType hinting already has existed for 30 years, and hand-hinting is falling out of fashion as 200%+ DPI is becoming the norm. In the future, we're just going to go back to grayscale AA, no hand-hinting at 9-14px ranges, no subpixel rendering, and at this scale hinting at all has a negligible effect.
Type 3 is not supported by OpenType's OTF or by WOFF, yet I can transform existing Type 1 formats (of which there are several) into OTF or WOFF, and continue using them with Freetype, DirectWrite, OSX's renderer, and in all major web browsers, with their glyphs exactly as intended by the original artist.
People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author fonts. They are not the best in class, and also produce fonts that don't comply with the relevant specifications.
People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author PDFs. They are not the best in class, and also produce PDFs that don't comply with the relevant specifications.
I can repeat this statement for basically everything Adobe makes: of formats they invented, they don't comply with their own specification while everyone else does, and there is a better domain-specific tool out there that replaces the use of them.
The only counter-example in Adobe's entire portfolio is Photoshop: it's not great at every specific use, but its the swiss army chainsaw of raster image manipulation; there's several better tools that do a specific task much better, but nobody has been idiotic enough to produce a tool that does all of them mediocrely at the same time.
Nothing wrong with (GIMP, Affinity Photo, PaintShop Pro, Pixelmator Pro, etc.) but since Photoshop is subscription-only I went all in and have replaced it in all of my workflows with the obvious superior alternative: Microsoft Paint.
I also dropped Adobe for Affinity because of price, but frankly, your reaction is not warranted for this news... good luck opening 35 year old Photoshop file with anything else than Photoshop.
My 30-year-old Photoshop files used PostScript fonts. Even multiple master fonts, which don't have the same broad support as mainstream PS fonts.
Good luck opening them with Photoshop.
Truth be told, most of my 30-year-old files are in PageMaker.
InDesign has some support for them for a while, but dropped support. Adobe's official line is "Open the PageMaker files in Indesign CS6 or an earlier version first, and then save them to native Indesign Format (.indd ). Once the files are saved in InDesign format, Indesign can open the files."
Of course, Adobe won't sell you old versions of InDesign to do that with, so YMMV.
I dropped Adobe for Affinity not so much for price, but because I can buy the software and use it forever. Even when I retire. I still have an Adobe subscription (paid for by someone else), but I don't use it.
That was my product, and I got in a lot of trouble for it.
ATM allowed you to use Adobe's scalable fonts in Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 did not have scalable fonts at all, only bitmap fonts that turned blocky if you asked for a font size that wasn't present. Windows 3.1 added scalable TrueType fonts, but it still didn't support Adobe Type 1 fonts.
The way I made it work was to patch into the API calls for font rendering, check that it was an Adobe font, and then call Adobe's font renderer instead of the one in Windows.
Some lawyer at Microsoft found out that I'd patched into these calls, and sent a letter to Adobe co-founder John Warnock that said the only way I could have accomplished it was by stealing the Windows source code.
Actually it was something that any reasonably talented Windows programmer of the day could figure out - anyone who knew about LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress could do it.
But why let facts get in the way when Adobe and Microsoft were feuding about other things and there was a chance to get an innocent programmer caught in the middle of that fight?
It all got sorted out in the end when we proved that it didn't take Windows source code to figure this out.
The one thing that stung was that Microsoft never did have the decency to apologize for falsely maligning my reputation.
But still allow downloads for legacy systems.
I'm a little fuzzy on those details, but I seem to recall that there was a problem with having too many fonts available at the same time. (Memory limitations?) So this new Adobe Type Manager let you select a subset of your fonts to be available at any given time.
Thank God we use TeX/groff and not InDesign.
Surely that is a takeaway here: Open standards, open formats, open source. And maybe "not Adobe" for good measure;) Nobody ever will - or can truly kill groff support for something; even if it were removed from the (many) implementations, you can just build an old checkout and be back in business.
Pure TeX of course, never changes.
It's very frustrating to have to go back and fix things that were done the correct idiomatic way at the time.
(This won't work as-is for .PFA/.AFM file pairs.)
This means that software can reach a state where known bugs have been fixed and the desired features have been implemented. Such software is de facto "finished". It doesn't need regular development and maintenance; it will continue working indefinitely for the same reason 2 + 2 will still be 4 in the future. Bryan Cantrill once explained[1]
>> software does not wear out. That isn’t to say that software never breaks (or isn’t broken to begin with), but software that works can work in perpetuity. A favorite example of mine is troff. The source for troff is some of the nastiest stuff ever written — but it works. It hasn’t been touched in years, and probably will never be: it’s written in a portable language (C) and relies only on the most basic OS facilities. troff will work indefinitely — it will never wear out.
>> (The tragic footnote to troff is that its author, Joseph Ossanna, died tragically in 1977; the very fact that his software is humming along perfectly more than a quarter of a decade after his death is a testament to software’s unique imperviousness to wear.)
Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old. Throwing away software that works is also throwing away decades of bugfixes and experience.
Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero. Removing support would have been more expensive: it required paying devs/testers/etc to implement the change. This is simply an attempt to push people onto other formats. Why should Adobe care how much this breaks? They don't have to pay the cost of updating an old projects.
[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...
it does degrade over time... at one point you have to use emulators to be able to run them
The thing you miss is that according to the parent, every piece of old software is useful and finished, except the ones they want the latest updates on. /s
That's the conventional wisdom, but actually it's wrong in every possible sense. Software is an inseparable part of its ecosystem, and the ecosystem is always evolving.
Decay is not a property of the physical world. It's a property of complex systems in general, be it natural or artificial.
> Software doesn't become a liability that should be removed simply by being old.
> Adobe's library of code for handing Type 1 fonts should have reached this "finished" state a long time ago. The maintenance cost of the Type 1 font feature should have been very close to zero.
By your own logic, you can just stick to using old Adobe software. Problem solved.
And you're wrong about Type 1 support being "finished". Given Type 1 isn't supported by any recent OS (and never was on mobile OS), it basically is a feature on its own, that has to be extended and maintained every time the software wants to make use of a new OS level font support feature, because both need to have parity.
Adobe stopped supporting it because the de-facto standard today is OpenType. Adobe doesn't want to "push" anyone to OpenType. It has no financial incentive to.
So you basically spun a conspiracy theory that is wrong in all possible ways at once.
This is just forced obsolescence.
After all, OpenType fonts are really just a fancy container with lots of features that ultimately contain font data as either Type 1 or TrueType description.
Sure you need a conversion tool, but it should be a lossless conversion as well, no?
So this doesn't seem like any kind of problem in practice. (Really Adobe ought to provide a conversion tool free of charge though.)
I mean, current Microsoft Word can't open Word 4.0 files back from 1989. At some point after decades, ancient file formats ought to be deprecated and it's up to users to convert to more modern formats.
And yes I understand this might technically be against a license agreement. But I really don't think any of the font foundries are going to go after you over a shrinkwrap license from a quarter century ago. And even if they did, you'd probably have a pretty good argument around fair use or something -- just because something's in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable.