Microsoft sheds light on Flash rival

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In some ways, Adobe is even more evil than Microsoft ever was.

The most evil, outright criminal thing that Microsoft did that I know of was MacBASIC (look it up). They took advantage of Scully, who folded like a tent to Microsoft’s blatantly illegal (even then) product-tying threat. Jobs would never have let Gates get away with that, and furthermore, that one act is largely responsible for Windows’s current dominance on the business desktop, since the loss of MacBASIC at such a critical time meant no easy way for Mac users to develop custom business apps at a time when the software market for both platforms was still lacking in general-purpose business apps. HyperCard was way too little, way too late.

Compare this with the most evil thing that Adobe did that I know of. Once upon a time there was a company called Ares FontWorks. Ares had a nifty font technology called Chameleon Fonts. Unlike PostScript Type 1 (or even Type 3, in which the letter shapes are defined by actual PostScript programs) and TrueType and even today’s OpenType fonts, Chameleon Font technology actually knew, internally, what the parts and aspects of characters were, not just how they were shaped.

Adobe had a technology (since abandoned for the most part) called Multiple Master. With this, a font could have multiple outline shapes for each character, each as the endpoints of one or more “axes” (plural of “axis,” not plural of “axe” — “acks-eez,” not “acks-ehz). A one-axis font would thus have two master shapes per character. A two-axis font would have four, a three-axis font would have eight, and so on. An axis represented a font characteristic that could be continuously varied. For instance, the weight (boldness) of a font could be varied continuously from super-ultra-light to super-ultra-black, or anywhere in-between. A two-axis font may have one axis for weight and another for width (super-ultra-condensed through super-ultra-expanded), and you could select a font anywhere along the matrix of both axes, such as super-black ultra-condensed. But this was just done by interpolating between the masters at the ends of the axes, each of which represented an ultimate extreme (for a single axis) or combination of ultimate extremes (for multiple axes). Multiple Master fonts still didn’t actually know what such concepts as width, weight, x-height, etc. actually were. And you couldn’t change a characteristic that didn’t have an axis (and thus extreme master outlines) available.

Compare this with Chameleon Fonts. All Chameleon Fonts knew what the parts and characteristics of letters were, and any of them could be varied continuously in any combination. Bolder, lighter, wider, narrower? Easy. How about increasing or decreasing the x-height (height of lower-case letters without ascenders or descenders, most notably the letter “x” [thus the name]), independently of the Caps height (height of upper-case letters), ascender height (height of “tall” lower-case letters such as b, d, h, k, and l), etc.? How about continuously changing the width and thickness of the serifs? Take any serif font, change its serif width and thickness to zero, and voila! Instant sans-serif version of the same font! Such fonts also even took up considerably less memory and disk space than even ordinary, everyday Type 1 and TrueType fonts!

It gets better: since each Chameleon Font was derived from a set of master outlines for Latin alphabet characters, and described as the differences from that master outline, you could even continuously change one font into another wildy different font, and interpoplate anywhere along that combination! Want a font that’s 25% Garamond and 75% Futura? No problemo! Just pick Garamond as Font Outline A and Futura as Font Outline B, and slide the slider 75% of the way between them! Watch the resulting font change smoothly from Garamond to Futura as you move that slider!

This technology existed almost twenty years ago! It was only on the Macintosh at first, but a Windows version was in the works. The program that manipulated these fonts, called FontChameleon, was at version 1.5.

And then Adobe bought out Ares. They even incorporated the Chameleon Fonts technology into the PostScript engine (as PostScript Type 47 or some such), but never actually used it. Adobe never publicized that this technology existed, and never released any Chameleon Fonts (even under the name PostScript Type 47 or whatever). They shelved all Ares products (not just Chameleon Fonts and FontChameleon, but also such great utilities as FontMonger, FontFiddler, etc.), and had only a brief notice buried on their Website (since removed) announcing the cessation of support for these products.

But Adobe wasn’t satisfied with killing off a major competing technology that was vastly superior in every respect to their own hideous Multiple Master technology (which they themselves eventually abandoned). No, merely buying Ares to shelve its products and technology wasn’t enough for them. They did everything they could to wipe the very memory that these technologies ever existed from the collective memory of humanity! They bought up every outstanding copy of the software they could find at used-software sites and stores worldwide, for starters.

At least they didn’t do the same thing to Macromedia (well, except for FreeHand, though they still sell the version of that that existed at the time of the merger [MX], though they don’t appear interested in upgrading it — but then again, neither did Macromedia before the merger). They, like Microsoft, do seem to have mellowed somewhat in their old age. The newest CS3 suite has Fireworks, not ImageReady; and Dreamweaver, not GoLive (which still exists as CS2); for instance.

I just wish Adobe would wise up to what they got from Ares, and modernize that Chameleon Fonts technology, merging it with OpenType Pro and making it Unicode-compatible.

I think that it should be illegal for any company to buy out another company for the express purpose of burying a competing, especially if superior, technology. Buy it if you intend to use it, yes.

Posted by: Joel R   Posted on: 05/03/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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