In the early eighties,
before the time of the first 286 or MAC, a typesetting
company called TextData in Sweden launched the first
'service bureaux' business. The cusomers were ad agencies
and people concerned with the creation of artwork who
normally ordered typesetting from special 'high quality'
typesetting companies. The hardware used was
Xenotron-terminals with specially written software. The
Xenotron was the first WYSIWYG terminal and was widely
used for Display ads for newspapers. The screen
representation of typefaces was restricted to four
'Times' designs which were used with different width
tables to be able to get proper line breaks when using
different fonts. Because of the bad screen representation
it was not possible to see the real placement of
characters and therefore not possible to change character
positioning (like kerning, tracking etc.). The basis of
the 'service bureaux' business idea was to achieve
perfect spacing without the need for the remote user to
be able to see it on the screen. For that purpose a huge
work was carried out by dedicated typographers employed
by the company. Over 10.000 combinations were checked by
eye and kerning and tracking values were generated 'by
hand'. It took about two weeks for two typographers to
create a table for one font. Many years were spent to
increase the number of fonts with kerning tables
available. This was not cheap for the customers. But is
was much cheaper then buying headlines and galleys from
the 'quality' typesetting companies, and then pasting it
up manually. The time used to produce a piece of work was
cut dramatically. And the spacing quality was as good as
from the most expensive high quality typesetting
companies. It also allowed to use all the 'desktop
publishing' benefits (except picture handling) before
'desktop publishing' was born.
 Today
with all the fast and powerful processors and programs,
SmartFonts still are outstanding and unreached by any
other fonts on the market. The powerful tables combined
with 3B2s advanced ligature features and typography
control results in easy to use and automatic quality
text. Easy and fast communication with the reader is
facilitated by the use of SmartFonts in documents.There
is no doubt that it is possible to create very bad
looking documents with very good fonts. But it is
essential to have expert spacing to generate carefully
designed documents.
200
SmartFonts are included in 3B2 and all font outlines are
supplied from the Monotype®library. Each one of the
SmartFonts have built-in kerning and tracking tables
which automatically adjust the letter and word spaces for
optimum line fit no matter how large or small the point
size of the type. Most of the kerning tables have as many
as 6.000 pairs to achieve as even spacing as possible,
resulting in easy to read text and headlines. All of the
SmartFonts contain a range of mathematical symbols and
special signs. If old style figures and/or small caps are
available, they are added in the font and are easy to
access. There is 'one key access' for floating accents
upper or lower case design. German and Scandinavian fixed
accented characters are also available. Automatic
fractions can be created with a choice of horizontal or
slanted bars, all at the touch of a single key and the
relative positioning of the fraction elements is
predefined for all sizes and all digital combinations,
thus creating perfect results... everytime. SmartFonts
are available only to 3B2-users, because there is no
other program that can handle the extensive built-in
tables without loss of speed and performance. 3B2 has
special functions which are only used with SmartFonts.
F.i. changing from table figures to old style figures
temporary or globally with a single command, or the
'figure kerning off'-function for tabular work, where
kerning is turned off for all combinations with figures,
but working in text in the same paragraph. Finally
SmartFonts now support two character sets, ISO and
SmartFont set, in the same font. And hanging punctuation,
optical alignment and side bearing elimination tables are
added to all fonts.
If
you need other font designs not available from the
Monotype library, a real 3B2 SmartFont with all the
features can be programmed by Originalab from your
PostScript printer font. With SmartFonts you lose none of
the functionality of 3B2 and you can have other typefaces
from the other sources running parallel with SmartFonts.
The advantage using SmartFonts is perfectly spaced text
and headlines. No other fonts in the publishing market
can produce quality as quickly and conveniently as
SmartFonts. |
