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.
I’m Thomas Phinney, typographer at large. You can reach me by email as tphinney at the cal.berkeley.edu domain (they do free email for alumni). Some things I have done that might be interesting:
- Currently (since April 1, 2009) senior product manager for font solutions at Extensis.
- Involved in all aspects of typography including: research, writing, technical & troubleshooting, history, type design, business, font standards, font embedding, font management, rasterization and web fonts.
- Frequent conference speaker, especially (but not only) typography and graphic design conferences.
- My interest in forensic typography has led me to be an expert witness in court, and to be consulted by the US Treasury Department, The Washington Post, and PBS’s “History Detectives,” among others.
- Worked in Adobe’s type group from June 1997 to December 2008, ultimately as product manager for fonts & global typography.
- Earned an MBA from UC Berkeley, and an MS in printing (specializing in typography) from RIT.
- Designed a very large typeface, Hypatia Sans. It has six weights, covers Latin-based, Greek and Cyrillic languages, and has extensive typographic features as well, resulting in 3000 glyphs per font. (Special thanks due here to Robert Slimbach for his guidance and advice, to Miguel Sousa for his extensive assistance, to Paul Hunt for his work on the final tweaking of the italic outlines and for kerning the italics, and to Robert and Miguel for kerning the upright fonts.)
- At Adobe, wrote the “Typblography” blog from its inception in 2005 until December 2008.
- I’m on the board of, and treasurer for, ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale, the international typographic association).
If you want just way too much detail about me, you can read a longer professional biography.
4 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