User Guide

there were not enough points on the character and not
enough buttons on the mouse and the screen was smaller
than my face—how could this possibly work? Well, within
two months I had a Mac Plus and Microsoft Word, so I
could “correspond with our clients.” I also purchased my
first copy of Fontographer from Altsys. I played around and
drew a few characters. It took a while to get the hang of
the Bezier tools. At first I thought I had a tiger by the tail.
But for me, used to the real estate of the big screen, and
the point structures of Bitstream outline fonts, this “toaster”
font design system was like painting a picture through a
porthole.
A bit later though, the Mac II came out. It didn’t take me
long to convince the powers at Bitstream
that “corresponding with our clients” would be a lot easier if
I had a more powerful machine and a bigger screen and a
LaserWriter and a 300 dpi scanner. (I can’t remember how
I got the scanner, I think it had something to do with OCR.)
The first upgrade of Fontographer also was bought and now
I was able to cook. I started making characters that were
much more complex than what we could make on our
proprietary system and I was making them in much less
time. But still I wasn’t making fonts. I will never forget the
first time I actually made a font on Fontographer.
Roger Black, the well-known publication designer who
worked at Newsweek back then, wanted a font for his
redesign of California Magazine. Roger had visited the
letterdrawing offices at Linotype where I worked in the
70’s, and he had visited Bitstream as well in the 80’s in
several failed attempts to get Linotype and Bitstream to
make custom fonts for him and his clients. When he came
back to strafe us again in the winter of 1986, we were
ready. Matthew Carter, Bitstream’s VP of design,
deflected him at me and I told Roger that we had never
actually made a font with Fontographer and the Mac, but
we would love to try. He sent me the artwork of a long
neglected type from an Italian foundry which I scanned,
and went to work on digitizing and spacing. I was totally
stunned at how quickly it was done and the quality of the
results. It was great, and Roger loved it as well. Most
especially because it took less than a working week to
accomplish. From the time we agreed to do the face to the
time it appeared in the magazine was about a month!
Fontographer User's Manual
Introduction Page #2