Apple v. Adobe Metrics

If you use Frame - or any high-end DTP product - on a Mac, let me suggest that you rip out your TrueType fonts !

Apple's TrueType fonts have metrics - in particular, character widths - that have different values from the metrics of Adobe fonts of the same name. If you have TrueType fonts installed in your system, as is the default upon installing system 7, your applications will use the TrueType metrics, and send to the printer jobs that have character spacing determined by TrueType metrics. If your printer has an Adobe font whose name matches characters spaced using the TrueType metrics, then the printer will use the Adobe type 1 font and its metrics, and your spacing will screw up.

The results vary application-by-application, depending on the character quanta (characters, words or lines) by which the app delivers its PostScript output. The problem can manifest itself as justification errors, underlines not aligning with their words and text being cropped by its (supposed) bounding boxes.

The solution is this: for any Adobe font resident in your printer, rip the corresponding TrueType font out of your system and make sure Adobe's screen (bitmapped) font is installed. Also, make sure you always un-check Font Substitution, in order to avoid Geneva TrueType being sent to the printer with its name remapped to Helvetica, invoking the metrics mismatch problem. If you have old, old, old applications, when printing to a LaserWriter you should always check Fractional Widths, otherwise your characters will be placed on a rather coarse 1/72-inch grid.

The spacing problem can appear whether or not Adobe Type Manager (ATM) is running. If you are running ATM then you will want Adobe's outline (printer) fonts as well as the bitmaps. Of course the presence of a TrueType font in the system file - or in the Fonts folder of System 7.1 and subsequent - will render inaccessible the correspondingly-named Adobe type 1 font.

The fundamental causes of this problem is that Apple have not yet learned what "open systems" means. Apple likes to invent different things, all their own, different from what others before them have done even if the function is identical. That is why:

• Apple uses CR to end a line instead of MS-DOS CR/LF or UNIX LF;
  
• Apple uses a ":" to separate filename components instead of MS-DOS's "\" or UNIX's "/";
  
• Apple invented AFP when NFS would have done just fine;
  
• Apple picked 1904 as the basis of their date system instead of MS-DOS's 1900, to save two or three clock cycles in the time utilities package;
  
• Apple decided that MPW command names and wildcard characters should be just a little bit different from their UNIX counterparts.

I like Apple a lot, but it is increasingly difficult to continue being a fan while they keep jerking us around like this.

They know about the TrueType/Adobe spacing problem - they should fix it.

Charles - Mac
1997-07-22