FONTLAB 4.0 MAC
Many Windows users started moving to the Mac only after 2004 when Apple released 10.4 Tiger, or after 2005 when they switched to Intel.
The Mac had a marginal user base at that time and Windows had its probably best release ever (some would claim, best to this date), Windows XP, in late 2001.
FONTLAB 4.0 SOFTWARE
Most software apps were still working in Classic mode or had just been ported to the clunky Carbon environment, and hardly any was written in Cocoa. Keep in mind that this was when OS X 10.2 Jaguar had been released, and many Mac users still worked on OS 9 since OS X was still very "experimental".
FONTLAB 4.0 FOR MAC OS
I worked with prerelease versions of FontLab 4 since mid-2001 when I was interning with Tiro Typeworks in Vancouver, and was not working for FontLab yet - I joined them in 2004.ĪFAIR, in August 2003, FontLab 4.6 for Mac OS 9 & X was released, the first version of FontLab 4.x for the Mac, and the first OpenType-capable font editor for the platform. It also was the first FontLab version to include Python scripting. I told him that doubted the revised Apple version would be the last iteration, and I was right.įontLab 4.0 for Windows, released in December 2001, was the first font editor that included OTF reading and writing and OpenType Layout feature editing, thanks to the integrated Adobe FDK library, which had been released by Adobe some time earlier.
I remember, at the time, encouraging one such user to think of Zapfino as an ongoing project: the gradual digital realisation of a design that Zapf had initially conceived of almost half a century previously. This caused considerable confusion and consternation among some users, whose documents suddenly exploded. In the next version of OSX, the font shipped with the same outlines but with the UPM value changed so that they would scale larger. When the first version was released, Apple's font group received complaints that Zapfino was too small relative to other types (the tall extenders had been scaled to fit within the UPM height). The Apple version itself also went through two, controversially incompatible versions. Later, Zapf worked with Akira Kobayashi to completely overhaul and refine the design for the OT version. We built the AAT version, based on outlines provided to us (plus a few extensions I made for diacritics), which had been produced during an earlier Type 1 iteration of the design. I think the OT version was released in 2003.Īpart from a change in technologies, there are significant design differences between the Apple version of Zapfino and the later OT version. Has 8 different shapes per letter, automatic substitutions for contextual alternates and ligatures. Zapfino by Hermann Zapf was first released in 1998 for Apple Advanced Typography (AAT), part of Apple’s proprietary GX technology, pre-OpenType. TrueType-based OpenType fonts work even with Windows 3.1 (from 1992). Microsoft called the early version of OpenType "TrueType Open" which they developed in 1994 and I think they have shipped some Arabic fonts with those layout tables before 1999.
FONTLAB 4.0 PRO
Adobe Garamond Pro, Myriad Pro and Minion Pro were among the first few OpenType fonts released by Adobe in 2000 (I think there were a few more).Īlso in 2000, Adobe released ATM 4.1 that added basic support for CFF-based OpenType fonts to Mac OS and to Windows 98/ME/NT 4. It shipped in June 1999 and included Arial and Times New Roman versions 2.76 that had OpenType Layout features for Arabic but none for Latin.Ī number of OpenType fonts were included with Windows 2000 that shipped in February 2000, mostly for Arabic and Thai, and Microsoft's first font with OpenType Layout tables for the Latin script (and possibly the world's first such shipping font), Palatino Linotype.Īdobe released InDesign 1.0 in August 1999, but I'm not sure if it bundled any fonts. Office 2000 was possibly the first product that bundled fonts with OpenType Layout tables, when they were called OpenType.