23 Mar 1992 | Print  |

Imaging Updates

by Adam C. Engst

QuickDraw was pretty neat when it came out, since it allowed the Mac to be a true graphics-based machine. Later on, Apple added color, turning it into Color QuickDraw, the standard in color-capable Macs today. QuickDraw is starting to age, though, and Apple has been working on some fixes. We've heard about two projects. The first will work with QuickDraw, providing additional 2D and 3D drawing features and some other nifty stuff, whereas the second project, which looms far in the future, will essentially act like Display PostScript, but will run faster and won't have an Adobe licensing albatross hanging from its neck.

In the meantime, QuickDraw's new sidekick will work with graphic objects rather than merely lines, as QuickDraw does now. Objects will include a line, a curve, a path, a rectangle, a polygon, text, a bitmap, and a picture, which is a combination of one or more of the other objects. Even better will be the built-in features that have only been available in drawing packages, such as rotation, skewing, scaling, and enhanced color support for various color output devices.

TrueType will gain from the new model, with Apple adding more sophisticated typographical controls for tasks like tracking and even some optical scaling, which allows you to significantly modify a font based on various variables. Currently only Adobe's Multiple Master fonts offer such capabilities, although Altsys recently announced Fontographer 3.5 which not only opens and creates Multiple Master fonts, but changes the weight of existing fonts or even interpolates between two different fonts. Of course Fontographer is for creating and editing fonts, whereas Multiple Master and the enhanced TrueType will allow font modifications within documents, but the end results are similar.

Information from:
Pythaeus
Altsys propaganda

Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 09-Mar-92, Vol. 6, #10, pg. 1

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