Fonts & Encodings

Appendix D. The TrueType, OpenType, and AAT Font Formats

Microsoft is not the only company that wants to take over the world. To a smaller degree, Adobe also sought to control the world of printing during the years 1987 through 1989, i.e., when its PostScript language first met with success. That was a source of no little worry to the two giants of the day (Apple and Microsoft), who started looking for another system for rendering fonts on screen. The two companies joined forces to develop one such system and thus break free of Adobe. Apple was supposed to be in charge of the fonts, and Microsoft was responsible for the engine for rendering graphics. The product that Microsoft promised to Apple was called TrueImage. But TrueImage never saw the light of day. For its part, Apple had a number of projects in hand. One project, called Royal, by a Finnish engineer named Sampo Kaasila, was selected and delivered to Microsoft.

Microsoft renamed it: "TrueType" was a better match for "TrueImage". In March 1991, Apple released a preliminary version of TrueType as a plug-in for its Mac OS 6. Microsoft took one year longer to incorporate TrueType into Windows 3.1 in 1992 [258]. The beginnings of TrueType under Windows were difficult because Kaasila, working with Apple, naturally wrote the code for 32-bit machines, whereas Windows 3.1 was still at 16 bits. These problems were not really resolved until 1995, with the release of Windows 95. During the 1990s, Mac OS and Windows equipped their ...