6 ms·

Do they not understand that designers, and especially publishers, have projects that go on and need to still be editable for years and years? I have dozens of b

Do they not understand that designers, and especially publishers, have projects that go on and need to still be editable for years and years? I have dozens of books on backlist from past decades with type 1 fonts. Some day I might want to do another printing run, in which case I need to be able to open them and edit the copyright page and fix typos and so on. Preferably when I do this I don't discover that the whole thing needs to be retypeset. Graphic designers must exist in the same position. Thank God we use TeX/groff and not InDesign.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> we use TeX/groff and not InDesign. Surely that is a takeaway here: Open standards, open formats, open source. And maybe "not Adobe" for good measure;) Nobody ever will - or can truly kill groff support for something; even if it were removed from the (many) implementations, you can just build an old checkout and be back in business.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Even LaTeX isn’t perfect here - older files will complain that something.sty is deprecated. But it still works years later. Pure TeX of course, never changes.
brongondwana 5y ago
My father-in-law has run into exactly this problem - documents he started working on in an earlier version of Word with Adobe Caslon are now no longer editable or printable because the new Caslon doesn't have the private codepage ligatures that he used. He's working on transcribing original prints from more than 100 years ago which used ligatures throughout. It's very frustrating to have to go back and fix things that were done the correct idiomatic way at the time.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  Why doesn't he just use the version of Caslon he started with? He must still have a copy of it embedded in the original document or on a disk somewhere no?
  - brongondwana 5y ago
    Because it's not supported by new versions of Windows or Word.
    - mmmrk 5y ago
      To ask the obvious, has he tried to convert the old fonts to OpenType? There are various free and proprietary tools to do that and Private Unicode Area ranges still exist.
    - Sunspark 5y ago
      To install a Type 1 font on Windows, you must have the .PFM file that normally accompanies the font's .PFB file and should be in the same directory as the .PFB file. You right click on the .PFM file and select Install. (This won't work as-is for .PFA/.AFM file pairs.)

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> we use TeX/groff and not InDesign. Surely that is a takeaway here: Open standards, open formats, open source. And maybe "not Adobe" for good measure;) Nobody ever will - or can truly kill groff support for something; even if it were removed from the (many) implementations, you can just build an old checkout and be back in business.

bombcar 5y ago
Even LaTeX isn’t perfect here - older files will complain that something.sty is deprecated. But it still works years later. Pure TeX of course, never changes.

brongondwana 5y ago

My father-in-law has run into exactly this problem - documents he started working on in an earlier version of Word with Adobe Caslon are now no longer editable or printable because the new Caslon doesn't have the private codepage ligatures that he used. He's working on transcribing original prints from more than 100 years ago which used ligatures throughout. It's very frustrating to have to go back and fix things that were done the correct idiomatic way at the time.

Sunspark 5y ago
Why doesn't he just use the version of Caslon he started with? He must still have a copy of it embedded in the original document or on a disk somewhere no?
- brongondwana 5y ago
  Because it's not supported by new versions of Windows or Word.
  - mmmrk 5y ago
    To ask the obvious, has he tried to convert the old fonts to OpenType? There are various free and proprietary tools to do that and Private Unicode Area ranges still exist.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    To install a Type 1 font on Windows, you must have the .PFM file that normally accompanies the font's .PFB file and should be in the same directory as the .PFB file. You right click on the .PFM file and select Install. (This won't work as-is for .PFA/.AFM file pairs.)