Updating older versions of Adobe fonts? Slightly off-topic, but related in a way!

Wed Jan 16 18:48:31 PST 2013

With regards to updating "old" versions of Adobe fonts ...

(1)        For better or for worse, Adobe has never offered any "upgrades" for users of individual typefaces or full font families licensed from Adobe. This includes not only the original Type 1 fonts, but also Multiple Master and now OpenType fonts (yes, there have been significant updates and improvements in those fonts since they were first released over a dozen years ago). The only upgrades that Adobe offers are for licensees of the Adobe Font Folio products. (I will not even attempt to provide the business reasons for this or justify it any way, but those were the decisions made. FWIW, Adobe's policies in terms of font upgrades is fairly consistent with industry practice.)

(2)        Originally, the OpenType format was also supposed to support a Multiple Master flavor of fonts, but this was dropped shortly before the first release of the OpenType fonts due to the objections of Microsoft who refused to support such a feature. When Adobe made the OpenType versions of the Type 1 Multiple Master fonts, it made an individual font to match each and every one of the primary instances of the comparable Type 1 Multiple Master font in terms of weight, style, optical style, etc. In some cases, extra fonts were added to reflect common customized Multiple Master instances that were believed to be in use and of general usefulness to users. Migrating from Multiple Master to OpenType requires you to match the Type 1 Multiple Master font instance with the particular member of the comparable OpenType font family.

(3)        With regards to "converting" fonts - let's say from Type 1 to OpenType, we strongly discourage that. Although this may sound self-serving and even assuming you use a product that preserves hinting and metrics, you gain virtually nothing from such conversions other than a repackaging of the font. In producing the OpenType version of its type library, quite a bit of work was done in the area of adjusting and correcting metrics, supporting Unicode, creating links that allow for automatic use of ligatures in page layout programs, easy access to alternative and swash characters, small caps, and old style figures, etc.

Given that Adobe hasn't release any Type 1 or Multiple Master fonts in a dozen years, from a business perspective, you can readily declare that your Type 1 fonts from Adobe are fully depreciated. Adobe is not abandoning Type 1 support in any of its products (nor do we have any plans for such abandonment) and we absolutely cannot eliminate Type 1 and Multiple Master support for Acrobat (for the obvious reason that we will "forever" need to support embedded fonts in existing PDF files).

What I typically recommend is for users to continue to use their Type 1 fonts with existing documents and publications and add the OpenType fonts as necessary under any one or more of the following scenarios:

(1)        You create a new publication (or artwork) or significantly modify the style of an existing publication (or artwork).

(2)        You need to have cross-platform compatibility for editing.

(3)        You need access to the typographical and multilingual features (via Unicode) of OpenType fonts.

Further note that the OpenType fonts from Adobe have different names (typically suffixed with either Std - standard character sets or Pro - extended character sets often with support for one or more non-Western Latin alphabets) than the Type 1 or Multiple Master fonts they replace. You will need to do some edit work to migrate an existing document to use of OpenType (note that this is where use of paragraph and character styles really pays off handsomely!). We purposely did this renaming in order to avoid any misperception of 100% compatibility of the Type 1 to OpenType migration. There is minor chance of text reflow, but also the possibility of problems with mapping of non-ASCII characters (this is especially true for all characters in fonts such as Symbol, Carta, Sonata, and Zapf Dingbats).

            -Dov

[cid:image001.png at 01CDF41A.14B92F20]

Dov Isaacs
Principal Scientist
Adobe Systems Incorporated

+1 408.536.2896 (tel)
+1 408.242.5161 (cell)
isaacs at adobe.com<mailto:isaacs at adobe.com>

345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA  95110-2704 USA
http://www.adobe.com<http://www.adobe.com/>

Feel free to print this e-mail if your needs dictate hard copy.
There is no need to feel guilty about printing!
Paper is renewable and recyclable.

ISAACS-OFFICE.corp.adobe.com

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net)
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:09 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Updating older versions of Adobe fonts? Slightly off-topic, but related in a way!

Hi, all (particularly Dov Isaacs, as I seem to remember that you know a lot about Adobe fonts).

Over the years, I bought a number of fonts from Adobe (some of them were quite expensive too) for use with FrameMaker. Of course, since these were all purchased _more_ than a decade ago, they are all Type 1 PostScript fonts (i.e, before the TrueType and OpenType formats even existed).

Now, I assume that, since my purchases, these fonts have _probably_ been improved and tweaked quite a bit. Plus, there are newer versions in the OpenType format now for many of these fonts (like Adobe Caslon, Adobe Caslon Expert, Adobe Garamond, Adobe Garamond Expert, Tekton ... just to name a few of the ones I purchased)!

1.       How can I "upgrade" (so to speak) these fonts to the latest - presumably OpenType? - versions of the same fonts without having to buy them all over again? I have not seen anything on the Adobe site that would seem to allow such an upgrade. Or would it be considered a supportable download, perhaps? :)

Buying new versions these would be quite an expensive proposition, so I am hopeful that you all have some recommendations here!

Also, some of these purchases were of "Adobe Multiple Master" Fonts (or some such name, as I recall). Since the old Adobe Type Manager is not supported under Windows 7, I don't know how to use these with Windows applications anymore - let alone FrameMaker.

2.       How do you all deal with these older Adobe Multiple Master Font formats? Am I even asking the right question here?

Thanks much for any recommendations/suggestions you all may have.

Z

________________________________
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Mike Wickham
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 6:51 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Updating older versions of Adobe fonts? Slightly off-topic, but related in a way!

I, too, wish there were an upgrade path for fonts.

Though I haven't tried them, something else to look at might be the

various font conversion utilities. Searching on "font conversion" turned

up several free online utilities. You can also buy professional

conversion utilities at http://www.fontlab.com.

Mike Wickham
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20130116/9fef4cad/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 871 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20130116/9fef4cad/attachment.png>