Sean:
>I'm trying to expand my knowledge of basic font rendering.
Mostly I want to understand the terms better. I'm not about to
try designing my own fonts.
>My background is in text processing, not rendering and I want
to better understand the issues font people deal with. I guess
that puts my request in
the
- how electronic fonts work / technical reference category.
In referring to "font people", I can think of at least 6
categories, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:
- type designers: they are concerned primarily with the visual
appearance of glyphs - both the shapes of the glyphs themselves
and of their relative position within a line and between lines
- font engineers: they are concerned with getting the outlines
created by the type designers into fonts that work and with how
text data (strings of character codes) get transduced into
positioned glpyhs (strings of glyph codes, possibly with
addition metric information)
- font technology developers: these are the people who dream up
font formats, write rasterizers, create font development tools
- OS type services API developers (originally I was lumping
these into the preceding group, but they're really different:
the latter group get paid to do this work; the former group
typically have to do other things to get paid in addition to
performing their magic): these people have to sort out what are
the functions and structures that need to be made available to
app developers so that they can display text (with varying
degrees of typographic finesse)
- app developers: in comparison with the preceding groups, they
typically have to relatively little thinking about fonts,
though that can vary depending up what they're trying to do
- typographers, designers, typesetters and desktop publishers:
people who use type in creating documents
To give a good answer to your question, it would help to know
which of these 5 categories in where your greatest interest
lies. (My guess is the second or the fifth.)
Have you checked out the following?
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.asp
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/main.html
http:
//developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/TextIntlSvcs/ATSUI/atsui.
html
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/Text/Text-181.html
(fonts.apple.com doesn't seem to want to work for me)
Peter
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