Thomas “my other car is a sans serif” Phinney on fonts, typography & text. Geeky troubleshooting and info for font developers and users. « About
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- This blog is about fonts, typography and text. It’s a mix of geeky troubleshooting, info for font developers and thoughts for regular end users who happen to be curious about typography.
Thomas Phinney is a typographer at large who can be reached by email as tphinney at the cal.berkeley.edu domain (they do free email for alumni). In his day job, which he occasionally moonlights from, he is senior product manager for fonts and typography at Extensis, including the WebINK web font solution. He is also treasurer of ATypI, the international typographic association. From 1997-2008 he did type at Adobe, lastly as product manager for fonts and global typography. His typeface Hypatia Sans is an Adobe Original (with help from Robert Slimbach, Miguel Sousa and Paul Hunt). Phinney has spoken at scores of conferences, including ATypI, AIGA, TypeCon, WebVisions, the InDesign Conference, Adobe MAX, and many others. He has long been involved in the design, technical, forensic, business, standards and history of type. His interest in forensic typography has led to testifying as an expert witness in court, being quoted in newspapers from the Washington Post to the Dallas Morning News, and being consulted by organizations ranging from PBS (for History Detectives) to the US Treasury Department. Phinney has an MS in printing from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.
If you want just way too much detail about Thomas, you can read a much longer professional biography.
7 commentsto “About”
Is it true that Adobe Type 1 fonts are becoming obsolete?
[I think that would depend on your definition of "obsolete." I wouldn't buy a new Type 1 font today, but they still work in pretty much all the places/apps they ever have. There aren't a lot of WPF applications out there on Windows. - T]
Currently we use Framemaker 8 to produce large training manuals using all Type 1 fonts, and whenever we try to substitute Open Type fonts, the Distiller pulls the Type 1 fonts anyway, even when they don’t seem to be installed on the system.
[You'd need to be more specific about how you're substituting the OpenType fonts for me to comment. For Adobe's fonts, the OpenType versions all have different names from the Type 1 versions, so the situation you describe would not be possible. - T]
Much of what we’ve read indicates that some of the newer applications won’t even recognize Type 1 fonts.
[There hasn't been much change in this area in recent years. If major software vendors are making font-using apps that use Windows Presentation Foundation, that would be an issue. See http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2005/10/phasing_out_typ.html But otherwise, not so much. A few apps or features of apps don't work with Type 1 fonts, but that's nothing new. Notable offenders are Visio, AutoCAD, and the WordArt feature in MS Word. - T]
Thomas, a colleague of mine from Ireland, Sinéad, tells me that the accent on the ‘e’ in her name should be flatter than the standard acute accent, and indeed, when I visited Dublin, accents were typically much less steep. Are you aware of the existence of a diacritical mark distinct from the acute accent in this way? I’m pretty sure it’s not in Unicode, but might it exist in any font you know of?
[This is a good example of something that's not a distinct character, but is a different glyph. That is, it's still an acute accent, just a different way of drawing it. In OpenType this could be handled by locale-specific alternate glyphs in the font. I'd suggest asking over on Typophile for some recommendations of fonts that have shallower acute accents. - T]
Haven’t seen this mentioned here yet…http://laikafont.ch/index_eng.html
Need your help: I am looking for guidance on how to use Opentype fonts, Mangal and Shruti ( Gujarati ) with Indesign CS4. Any help that you can provide will be much appreciated. Thanks.
If UniqueIDs and XUIDs are no longer necessary, is there a way to remove them from the mix?
Can they be forced to a value of ’0′ (to avoid caching) or is it possible to remove the reference entirely and still have the font render properly?
[Not sure why this came in here, but they can just be omitted. The only risk to having a font render properly is by including a UniqueID or XUID. - T]
This website may interest you. The featured article is about J.F. Cumming, so there’s has a bit about J.W. Phinney (more to come later):
http://typeheritage.com
–Anna