It was no less than a war.

Adobe Systems Inc. was the linchpin in the desktop publishing revolution with its PostScript type technology. Joining the Apple Macintosh, PageMaker by Aldus and Canon's laser printer engine, PostScript produced high-quality printing—for thousands less than the competition.

PostScript was a runaway success, and the desktop publishing revolution was on. But in every war there are victims.

Twenty years later, publishing aficionados continue to bemoan the decline in contemporary design of typography—the art and technique of editing and selecting type. DTP has brought publishing to the masses but has also devalued and commoditized type to the point where users get most of their fonts in software bundles, through piracy or as downloads of low-quality freeware.

Competition has eroded the price of type, and piracy has eaten deeply into the profits. TrueType font packs and bundling also erode font value. For example, Corel includes over 500 TrueType fonts and symbols in CorelDraw Essentials for $79.99.

Author David Blatner declares InDesign the winner of the DTP wars. Click here to read more.

Once steeped in tradition, type foundries cast typefaces in various lead alloys and proudly traced their fabled industry roots to the early days of printing and Guttenberg. As publishing went digital, foundries were buffeted by restructuring and market consolidation.

But that may be changing. As consumers and manufacturers embrace a new font format (OpenType) and companies (and publishers) continually look to further differentiate themselves from the competition with unique branding, a long-awaited typography renaissance may be dawning.

Adobe has long dominated the digital font market, and they really haven't looked back since they licensed Times and Helvetica from Linotype in 1985. As the maker of PostScript font technology and Adobe Type 1 (also called PostScript fonts), they so overshadow the font market that some publishers and printers are reluctant to use fonts from other manufacturers. Many designers never venture outside the Adobe Font Folio.

For some, this fear has escalated to the level of a prepress issue. In the popular preflight software Markzware Flightcheck, publishers can be alerted when a font used in a document "cannot be determined to be an official Adobe font."

No fear

However, those fears may be unfounded.

Robin Williams, author of dozens of best-selling books on desktop publishing, including The Mac [or the PC] Is Not a Typewriter, and The Non-Designer's Type Book, e-mailed that she rarely had issues with fonts from professional foundries and questioned the practice of purchasing fonts from Adobe only.

The self-described typography freak, who publishes several Internet columns and dozens of articles on type, e-mailed, "I love Adobe's fonts, but they do tend to offer mainstream styles.

"I have been collecting fonts from dozens of foundries for many years and have printed close to fifty books at a variety of print shops (and some books have had at least one hundred different fonts in each book) and have rarely had a problem. I do avoid the low-level font vendors—the ones that obviously steal other fonts, tweak them, and repackage them for something like '$49 for 1,000 fonts!'"

Williams wrote, "When I need new, delightful, provocative, evocative, juicy fonts, I automatically go to vendors like Veer.com, LetterSpace.com, t26.com, GarageFonts.com, ThreeIslandsPress.com, FontShop.com, FontHaus.com, P22.com, GalapagosDesign.com, or MyFonts.com, many of which offer fonts from a variety of designers and foundries [from] around the world."

Besides avoiding discount fonts for high-quality print publishing, Williams suggested purchasing an inexpensive font from the foundry or vendor under consideration and dissect their work.

Williams wrote, "If you can view the outline of a typical letter and look at the points—a well-designed, well-crafted font will have a minimum of points on the outline. For instance, a classic capital O will have four points on the outside and four on the inside, generally (depending on the font) all at right angles on the most extreme edges. Fonts that aren't so classic, of course, will generally have more points, but if a font has thousands of random points it indicates no one took the time to clean it up properly, which not only indicates the low quality, but can cause trouble going through the typesetter's RIP."

Foundries

Globally, there are hundreds of font foundries. MyFonts.com, a font store and subsidiary of Bitstream, boasts more than 40,000 fonts from more than 220 foundries.

A type designer makes typefaces and typically works for a type foundry. The foundry can sell its own fonts or license them to a font vendor, who markets and sells them to the public. Software manufacturers such as Adobe, Apple and Microsoft will license fonts to include with their operating systems or applications.

Next Page: OpenType format is on the rise.