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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Russ who wrote (10328)	3/28/1998 12:14:00 AM
From: yofal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Russ sez: "(1) Any of the bears here want to tell me the story of TrueType? Who wrote it, where it's used, and why it came out?" Don't get him started! :-) Wasn't there another wacky format in their too? "Royal" something or other? It's all a blur... G AA PL

To: Russ who wrote (10328)	3/28/1998 1:28:00 AM
From: FR1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

>Any of the bears here want to tell me the story of TrueType? Who wrote it, where it's used, and why it came out?< As I recall it, Apple came out supporting postscript. It was the artist dream but....it made the first laser printers horribly expensive. Microsoft was in the business of seeing a lot of computers sold because each one had their OS. Postscript was a big problem because Adobe had a big royalty on everything it touched. It really threatened MS because the royalty issue would creep into all MS apps through font usage. Adobe was greedy and demanded a really high royalty. Postscript was used in type fonts and drawings. So Billy decided to attach on two fronts: (1) Type Problem: Create a "postscript-like" type face that did not need a printer font + a screen font (only one file needed) and give it away so more people would buy computers. (2) Drawing Problem: MSFT created the "Windows Metafile" format to allow "postscript-like" drawings to occur - again damn near royalty free. It worked - Adobe had to start bringing down their font charges. This was a good thing because we would still be paying through the nose had MS not done this. The "Windows Metafile" format was a dud. Primarily because MS correctly realized that if you had a lot of points on your line you would have a much sharper line. So the default was to have a zillion break points in a drawing. Needless to say, it choked all the rips and artist hated it. MS really did not care - the type problem was their main enemy and they killed it.