The Font Wars, Part 2

Abstract

In the early 1980s, letters rasterized from outline fonts at low and medium resolutions had irregular shapes. The lower the resolutions, the greater the irregularities, and the more that typographers criticized the type quality. PostScript fonts, launched in 1985, regularized medium resolution type with secret ingredients coyly called “hints” by Adobe. This prompted competing inventions of font regularization using techniques variously called “instructions,” “delta exceptions,” “procedures,” “intelligence,” and other terms sounding more like hi-tech snake oil than science. Further research and open publication, however, revealed their connections to traditional aesthetics of letter symmetry as well as to modern signal processing, pattern recognition, and psychophysics, thus expanding our understanding of typography in digital culture.

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