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Movable
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570
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 Johannes Gutenberg spreads ink on his printing press, circa 1440. The lettering above is set in Guilford, a design which retains some medieval qualities. References Adobe: Comp.fonts FAQ: |
During the period 1991 to 1998 Rubicon produced a number of font clones. There were many small companies doing this but we survived because our font clones were digitised accurately at high resolution and were better quality than most. In the USA typefaces and bitmapped fonts are not copyrightable but scalable fonts are. Anyone with sufficient time and skill can make an original representation of a typeface as a scalable font and copyright it. For information on font copyright laws in the USA and elsewhere refer to the links at the left or consult a lawyer. In 1991–1992 we produced a series of fonts based on the Computer Modern designs from TEX and Metafont. These brought critical acclaim but not much revenue. The look of the Computer Modern fonts was not mainstream. We provided some of these fonts as demo fonts for Fontographer 3.5. In 1993–1994 we produced a series of fonts based on popular designs like Garamond, Frutiger, Kabel, and Optima. This was successful until 1997 when companies like Microsoft, Corel, Adobe, and Apple started bundling high quality fonts with their software. In 1995–1996 we produced a series of fonts that emulated the base fonts of Postscript and PCL laser printers. For Postscript printers this was Times and Helvetica and for PCL printers this was CGTimes and Univers. This turned out to be a great idea because it meant that you could print documents that looked like they came from an Apple LaserWriter or Hewlett-Packard LaserJet on a much cheaper printer. We also added Light and Extrabold weights as well as Condensed weights to several of our popular fonts. In 1997–1998 we produced some decorative fonts and a series of fonts based on the designs of Gill Sans and Helvetica Neue. At the end of 1998 we decided it was no longer beneficial to produce font clones. Instead, we decided to maintain and improving our existing fonts, concentrating on adding better hinting and producing better TrueType versions. Scalable printer fonts leave a rich legacy Scalable printer fonts were introduced in 1985 and quickly became popular for electronic documents. The fonts resided in printer ROMs and you had to print your electronic documents in order to read them. Gradually, desktop computers came to have scalable fonts and these displaced printer fonts in importance. One benefit was that you could view electronic documents on-screen. Yet, scalable printer fonts leave a rich legacy. The milestones in the history of scalable printer fonts are as follows: In January, 1995, Apple introduced the LaserWriter printer with the Adobe Postscript page description language and support for scalable fonts in Type 1 and Type 3 formats. At that time the HP LaserJet did not support scalable fonts, unless you purchased an expensive Postscript upgrade. The most popular Postscript fonts were Helvetica and Times Roman. In March, 1990, Hewlett-Packard introduced the LaserJet III. It supported scalable fonts in Intellifont format. The most popular PCL 5 fonts were CGTimes, Univers, and Univers Condensed. In September, 1990 Adobe released the specifications of the Postscript Type 1 font format to the public. The industry responded with wide support for the Type 1 fonts and dropped support for Type 3 fonts. In May, 1991 and April, 1992 Apple released System 7 and Microsoft released Windows 3.1 with support for scalable desktop fonts in TrueType format. Gradually, scalable desktop fonts became more important than scalable printer fonts. The industry moved towards supporting both Type 1 and TrueType fonts and dropped support for Intellifont. The most popular TrueType fonts were Times New Roman and Arial. In September, 1997, Adobe released Postscript 3. This included the core fonts from Windows and MacIntosh as well as selected fonts from Microsoft Office and Hewlett-Packard. Not counting these fonts, the most popular new Postscript 3 fonts were Gill Sans, Helvetica Condensed, Optima, Stempel Garamond, Univers, and Univers Condensed. |
Rubicon fonts are
In 2007, FontShop in Germany published a list of the 100 best commercial fonts of all time, according to a panel of judges. Fonts that come bundled with computers were excluded. The top 10 fonts were as follows:
For the complete list of all 100 fonts, in German, refer to the following web site: Die 100 Besten Schriften Aller Zeiten See Helvetica at the Cinema The year 2007 marked the 50th birthday of the Helvetica font design. This event spawned many new articles, public exhibitions, and even a movie. Refer to the following web site: Helvetica: A Documentary Film |
| Updated May 17, 2010 |