Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Steve Izma]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2024 at 07:13:38PM -0400, James Cloos wrote:
> Subject: Re: the Courier font family and nroff history
> 
> So blame Jobs for Courier as the monospace family and for
> Times(12) as the serif family.  And for Helvetica as the Sans
> family.

I think we need to remember the third party in this development:
Merganthaler-Linotype. In my memory, it was by far the most
powerful of the group that announced a joint project around 1985.
The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was also involved,
probably because they were producing the most desirable new
designs for the advertising and publishing industry -- they might
even have had a head start in digitizing fonts.

I tend to believe that Linotype was the driving force in the
release of a complete package for corporate typesetters: the
Linotronic 202 (or something like it) driven by Adobe's new
PostScript rasterizer (RIP), using ITC fonts, and with two
choices of front ends: either a very expensive inputting and
editing terminal made by Linotype or else a much cheaper (almost
hobby-level) Macintosh.

Apple also offered one of their printers as a proofing device so
as not to waste photgraphic materials (Doug McIlroy almost under
estimates the hassle that would result if you made a mistake on
typographic photo paper). Many small printers that couldn't
afford the Linotronic cheated by using Apple printers (I think
they were fairly early laser printers) for output. The resulting
quality can mostly be described as cheap.

This was Merganthaler-Linotype's attempt to dominate the big
commercial photo-typography market (including big newspapers) to
head off other companies developing CRT-based photo-typographers,
especially Autologic and maybe Compugraphic. I can't readily find
info on this (Frank Romano's "History of the Linotype Company"
would have it, but I can't get at this book easily), so I'm
straining my memory to the limit.

I suspect that Apple had nothing to do with font choice.
Everyone, especially newspapers, wanted Times Roman because it
was the best way of cramming more words onto the page. There used
to be a measure of the overall horizontal space required by any
particular font -- I think it was called alphabet length or
something. I've never come across a readable, non-condensed serif
font that takes up as little space as TR. Newspapers and
magazines needed it. So did many book publishers trying to
minimize the number of signatures coming off the press.

Unfortunately, my library of books on typography and old issues
of U&lc magazine (a mouth-wateringly wonderful publication of the
ITC) got severely damaged in a house fire a few months ago.
Otherwise I would have done due diligence and checked these
memories more thoroughly.

        -- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma@golden.net  cellphone: 519-998-2684

==
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and
therefore never scrutinize or question.
    -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996