4 ms·

I remember Adobe Type Manager for Windows 3.1, how far things have come.

Stratoscope 5y ago
Wow, you have a good memory! (Not being sarcastic.) That was my product, and I got in a lot of trouble for it. ATM allowed you to use Adobe's scalable fonts in Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 did not have scalable fonts at all, only bitmap fonts that turned blocky if you asked for a font size that wasn't present. Windows 3.1 added scalable TrueType fonts, but it still didn't support Adobe Type 1 fonts. The way I made it work was to patch into the API calls for font rendering, check that it was an Adobe font, and then call Adobe's font renderer instead of the one in Windows. Some lawyer at Microsoft found out that I'd patched into these calls, and sent a letter to Adobe co-founder John Warnock that said the only way I could have accomplished it was by stealing the Windows source code. Actually it was something that any reasonably talented Windows programmer of the day could figure out - anyone who knew about LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress could do it. But why let facts get in the way when Adobe and Microsoft were feuding about other things and there was a chance to get an innocent programmer caught in the middle of that fight? It all got sorted out in the end when we proved that it didn't take Windows source code to figure this out. The one thing that stung was that Microsoft never did have the decency to apologize for falsely maligning my reputation.
- cable2600 5y ago
  Looks like they haven't supported it since 2005: https://www.adobe.com/products/atmlight.html https://www.adobe.com/products/atmlight.html But still allow downloads for legacy systems.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Yeah, that was a different product with the same name. The ATM I worked on was a low level font rendering utility. It became obsolete in a few years as Windows evolved to include a formal font driver interface, so Adobe repurposed the name for a font management tool. I'm a little fuzzy on those details, but I seem to recall that there was a problem with having too many fonts available at the same time. (Memory limitations?) So this new Adobe Type Manager let you select a subset of your fonts to be available at any given time.
    - ogurechny 5y ago
      Up to Windows XP, having many additional fonts registered notably increased system boot time. It silently did full font enumeration on start, like fontconfig without cache does. That's at least one problem.

Wow, you have a good memory! (Not being sarcastic.) That was my product, and I got in a lot of trouble for it. ATM allowed you to use Adobe's scalable fonts in Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 did not have scalable fonts at all, only bitmap fonts that turned blocky if you asked for a font size that wasn't present. Windows 3.1 added scalable TrueType fonts, but it still didn't support Adobe Type 1 fonts. The way I made it work was to patch into the API calls for font rendering, check that it was an Adobe font, and then call Adobe's font renderer instead of the one in Windows. Some lawyer at Microsoft found out that I'd patched into these calls, and sent a letter to Adobe co-founder John Warnock that said the only way I could have accomplished it was by stealing the Windows source code. Actually it was something that any reasonably talented Windows programmer of the day could figure out - anyone who knew about LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress could do it. But why let facts get in the way when Adobe and Microsoft were feuding about other things and there was a chance to get an innocent programmer caught in the middle of that fight? It all got sorted out in the end when we proved that it didn't take Windows source code to figure this out. The one thing that stung was that Microsoft never did have the decency to apologize for falsely maligning my reputation.

cable2600 5y ago
Looks like they haven't supported it since 2005: https://www.adobe.com/products/atmlight.html https://www.adobe.com/products/atmlight.html But still allow downloads for legacy systems.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Yeah, that was a different product with the same name. The ATM I worked on was a low level font rendering utility. It became obsolete in a few years as Windows evolved to include a formal font driver interface, so Adobe repurposed the name for a font management tool. I'm a little fuzzy on those details, but I seem to recall that there was a problem with having too many fonts available at the same time. (Memory limitations?) So this new Adobe Type Manager let you select a subset of your fonts to be available at any given time.
  - ogurechny 5y ago
    Up to Windows XP, having many additional fonts registered notably increased system boot time. It silently did full font enumeration on start, like fontconfig without cache does. That's at least one problem.