Could 14, 2025 at 4:18 PM by Dr. Drang
I don’t learn about you, however I’ve loved the hell out of a few latest Daring Fireball posts. There was Monday’s, by which John Gruber excoriated the infantile “single-story” a that Apple makes use of within the Notes app. After which immediately’s submit in regards to the short-lived single-story a within the Geneva 9-point font on the daybreak of the Macintosh. This second one received Gruber so excited he really put photos within the submit.
As a result of I didn’t personal a Mac till 1985, I missed the single-story a in Geneva 9, however I undoubtedly keep in mind one other, much less obnoxious variation in font design with measurement: The descender on Geneva’s lowercase y.
Following Gruber’s lead, I went to Infinite Mac, fired up a 1985-vintage System 2.1 emulator, and made this straightforward MacWrite doc:
As you’ll be able to see, the descenders for the 9-, 10-, and 12-point sizes are curved, however the descenders for the bigger sizes are straight. I remembered this 40 years after the actual fact not as a result of I used massive fonts fairly often, however due to an fascinating characteristic of the ImageWriter printer.
Again earlier than the LaserWriter and PostScript (it’s an all InterCaps day right here at ANIAT) made decision independence commonplace, most printers have been of the dot-matrix selection, normally at a reasonably low decision. The unique ImageWriter had a better decision than most: 144 dpi. And this led to the fascinating characteristic.
You could have seen that the 144 dpi decision of the ImageWriter is precisely twice that of the Mac’s 72 dpi display. The ImageWriter printer driver on the Mac took benefit of that. In case you have been writing a doc utilizing a 12-point font, and your Mac had a 24-point model of that font, the Mac would ship the 24-point font’s bitmaps (all Mac fonts have been bitmapped in these days) to the printer so it may render smoother textual content.
The upshot of this was a really slight breaking of the WYSIWYG precept. On the display, your Geneva 12 doc would seem with curly ys, however once you printed it out, it might have straight ys. A enjoyable idiosyncrasy that disappeared when PS fonts and Adobe Kind Supervisor took over.
By the way in which, how do you know in case your Mac had a double-sized bitmap of a font? Effectively, you can hearth up ResEdit, however the simpler manner was to tug down the Type menu.
Sizes current as bitmaps in your Mac have been displayed in a defined model. Sizes that weren’t (and can be scaled—typically trying ugly in consequence) have been displayed in a plain model. Whereas the workhorse doc fonts Geneva and New York had bitmaps in a number of sizes, different fonts, like Chicago, had only one.
