brandknewmag.com
30
Back in the late 1970s, computer scientists working on the
first laser printer discovered they had a problem: how do
you scale a digital font without making it look terrible at low
resolutions? You stop thinking in pixels.
what it was supposed to look like, which the PostScript system
would then render into a series of pixels at the last minute,
tweaking the font as necessary to make sure it rendered
correctly at different sizes.
Let’s imagine the “H” of a hypothetical serif font. This “H”
might have been designed to look fine at high-resolutions,
but as you scale it, problems will arise because various parts
of the letter such as the serifs or the stems will only partially
fill a pixel. What do you with those pixels: turn them on or
turn them off?
PostScript allowed designers to create just one copy of a
font, and not have to worry about hand-tweaking a separate
copy for every font size. And because PostScript was just a
description of how a font was supposed to look, the system
allowed designers to use “hints” to tell a computer or laser
This is called the rounding problem. If you decide that any
section of a letter that overlaps with a pixel should result in
that pixel being filled completely, you end up with fonts that
look distorted. But if you decide to leave that pixel off, you end
up losing information--and that can have dire consequences,
like making a vital part of the letter disappear entirely.
ADOBE’S IDEA WAS TO STORE
FONTS NOT AS PICTURES,
BUT AS DESCRIPTIONS.
It was a tricky problem that at the time had only one solution:
designers had to hand-tweak every font so that it looked
good at a number of different sizes. Not only was this a
laborious, time-consuming process, but computer storage
was extremely expensive at the time. It was a waste of valuable
storage to have to keep on hand 40 or 50 different handtweaked variations of Times New Roman on a computer or
laser printer, just to display it at every resolution. You’d rather
store 40 or 50 different fonts instead.
But as computer science professor David Brailsford of the
University of Nottingham explains in this fascinating account
of pioneering work on digital fonts, eventually, a couple of
“font magicians” figured out a clever solution for the proble