Font Geek Bona Fides
Charles Johnson
Thu Sep 9, 2004 at 5:20 pm PDT • Views: 1,322
I actually received two emails from people questioning my expertise to examine and criticize the documents shown in the entries immediately below. Can you believe it?
So here’s the skinny.
I’ve been involved with desktop publishing software and scalable software fonts (as opposed to hot lead type) almost since their inception. I’m a former West Coast editor of a popular computer magazine for a now-orphaned computer, the Atari ST/TT.
I also co-owned a software publishing firm, CodeHead Technologies, for whom I designed and laid out packaging and manuals for more than a dozen products (in addition to developing most of those products, using 680x0 assembly language). We used a combination of DTP and traditional typesetting techniques for these jobs, and I cut my teeth on some of the first serious DTP software ever created for personal computers—including Aldus Pagemaker and Aldus Freehand on the Mac, and less recognizable titles available for Atari computers (anyone still using Calamus or Pagestream out there?).
My software company also marketed a word processing program (Calligrapher, written by a developer in Britain) that had the ability to import and use Postscript Type 1 fonts. And I had early experience with some of the dinosaur-like dedicated word processors that were available in the 70s/80s.
I’m not boasting like this just to pump up my lizardoid ego; it’s to let you know that I have an extensive background in these subjects—and when I tell you that there’s no way the CBS News documents were created on any machine available in 1972/1973, I ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.
Frank says: