DSPR12B - PRINT FUNDAMENTALS - TASK 5: CUVCRS05A

For Task five I will discuss, in relation to Adobe Illustrator CS the following:

• Adobe Type Engine
• Legacy Type
• Open Type
• Post Script Type 1
• True Type Fonts

The Adobe Type engine is new to CS and can easily move files between MACs and PCs without character encoding errors. It's the exact same text engine that appears in Photoshop CS and in After Effects 6.0. The text engine brings full OpenType support to Illustrator CS. Other features are made possible with the new Adobe Text Engine including Kerning, Margin Alignment, Roman Hanging Punctuation, Tab Leaders, real Rows and Columns the Adobe Everyline Composer, better hyphenation, spell check, new Type on Path functionality, the ability to rotate text characters individually new text threading options similar to InDesign AND even the ability to thread text across multiple type on path objects. The new text in Illustrator CS isn't just an enhancement it's a brand new feature. The advancement in technology of the new text engine in Illustrator CS, text isn't compatible with previous versions of Illustrator.

Legacy Type

This is a new type engine in Adobe Illustrator CS. It gives the designer the ability to export type into other older versions of Illustrator and keep the integrity of the original document as it treats the document object as a graphic. However for the new file to behave the designer must update the type for editing purposes.

OpenType is a new cross-platform font file format developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe now offers hundreds of fonts in the OpenType format. The two main benefits of the OpenType format are its cross-platform compatibility the same font file works on Macintosh and Windows computers and its ability to support widely expanded character sets and layout features, with advanced typographic control.

Adobe Post Script Type 1

Before Adobe Post Script 1 font can be used, it must be rendered into dots in a bitmap, either by the PostScript interpreter, or by a specialized rendering engine, such as Adobe Type Manager.
The Type 1 outline files do not contain sufficient information for typesetting with the font, because they have only limited metric data, and no readable information about position adjustments of particular adjacent characters. This missing information is supplied in additional files, called .afm (Adobe Font Metric) files. These are ASCII files with a well-defined easy-to-parse structure. Some font vendors, such as Adobe, allow them to be freely distributed; others, such as Bitstream, consider them to be restricted by a font license which must be purchased.

TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple to compete with Adobe Type 1 and used also in PostScript. The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how the font character is viewed.