QuickDraw GX had a great deal of advance press, which isn't surprising given that it was originally supposed to ship with the first release of System 7 three years agoShow full article

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QuickDraw GX had a great deal of advance press, which isn't surprising given that it was originally supposed to ship with the first release of System 7 three years ago. Apple promised it would improve the Chooser and Print Monitor, word processing companies swore it would easily enable landscape and portrait page orientations in the same document, font makers noted that GX-style fonts can offer much more than ever before, Adobe, Farallon, and other digital document software creators surely noticed the Portable Digital Document Maker feature, and we users tried to sort out the features from the babble and the hype. This multi-part article explains what to expect from QuickDraw GX and the basics of how to use it.

QuickDraw GX comes with Apple's recently released System 7.5, but third-party developers can license it for a small fee and include it with their products (it comes on four high-density floppy disks). I acquired my copy through Peirce Software's Peirce Print Tools, a set of QuickDraw GX extensions that add assorted printing capabilities to the basic GX lineup. (You can find out more about GX extensions in Part II of this article, and I plan to review Peirce Print Tools in an upcoming TidBITS issue.)

Hardware Headaches and Software Minimums -- QuickDraw GX isn't for everyone and requires more RAM than many Macs have to spare. Here's the low down - to run QuickDraw GX, you need:

• System 7.1 or later

• 68020-based Macintosh or newer (including the Power Macs)

• Approximately 1.7 MB of RAM that you can dedicate to QuickDraw GX

• 400K RAM that you can dedicate to Adobe Type Manager GX (only if you use ATM GX)

• A GX printer driver for your printer. QuickDraw GX comes with drivers for: StyleWriters (no Color StyleWriter), ImageWriters, various LaserWriters (a few of the QuickDraw LaserWriters appear to be missing, but you may be able to substitute an existing driver for a missing one). Note that many (if not all) PostScript printers do work with the LaserWriter driver, but if you need to (or wish to) use a third-party driver, you must ask the third-party about the driver (in general, third-parties are releasing GX drivers).

If your hardware can handle GX and you like to play around with funky printing projects, GX offers you hours of amusement. If you work in an environment where a bank of printers hang out near every water fountain and you can never remember whose office has the color DeskWriter this month, then you need GX to help you avoid extra trips to the Chooser. If you work in a corporate environment where the Help Desk staff is more NT-oriented than Mac-savvy and (as a result) you know the location of every Mac printer within a twenty minute walk, GX will save you more trips to the Chooser than you can make in a month of Sundays.

What Supports QuickDraw GX? -- Remember System 7-savvy? Depending on who you asked, System 7-savvy meant different things, although after a while people came to agree that you might expect a System 7-savvy application to support virtual memory, Publish & Subscribe, offer at least a few Apple events, and so on. Similarly, GX-savvy means different things to different people, but on a basic level, a GX-savvy application must support the "GX printing architecture" by recognizing GX printer drivers and offering GX-style Print and Page Setup dialog boxes. On a more sophisticated level, a program might support GX fonts by recognizing their extended character set (up to 65,000 characters per font) and by handling their "line layout capabilities" (Part II of this article will have more on GX fonts.)

To find out to what extent a program supports QuickDraw GX, you'd have to ask the company that makes the program, though it's a reasonable assumption that software released before this summer does not support GX. In much the same way that native Power Mac programs have dribbled out over the past seven months, I expect that GX-savvy software will slowly arrive, though I expect more programs will support the printing architecture than the fonts.

Of the new crop of word processors coming out this fall, only WordPerfect 3.1 and Word 6 can claim GX support (WordPerfect 3.0 also has GX support.) These three programs support the GX printing architecture, but none support the fonts. The soon-to-be released FullWrite 2.0 and NisusWriter 4.0 will not support GX, though both companies plan to add GX support in future releases. Adobe (the name "Aldus" has disappeared into the dust stirred up by the Adobe-Aldus merger) is still hedging over GX support for PageMaker, and Quark has said QuarkXPress won't support GX, though they also said they wouldn't ship a PowerPC native versions and later changed their minds.

Of the three programs currently planned to ship with full GX support, the one I'll be keeping an eye out for is Manhattan Graphics's Ready,Set,Go! GX version 7, but it will also be interesting to check out the full GX support in the more specialized Typestry 2 (from Pixar) and FontChameleon (from Ares Software Corporation). The folks working on Ready,Set,Go! GX hope to ship version 7 by the end of 1994 - I know I'll be checking out their booth at January Macworld Expo.

Desktop Printer Icon -- Installing GX works much like installing any other program, but once you install it, you cannot print until you set up a desktop printer (tech support people, pay attention here!). If you don't set up a desktop printer, attempts to print result in error messages, such as "Select Chooser from the Apple menu to create a desktop printer."

To create a desktop printer, open the Chooser, select a driver icon, select a specific port or printer, and then click the Create button. The desktop printer icon sits on the desktop, and you cannot place it elsewhere, though you can place an alias elsewhere. If you select a desktop printer icon, a Printing menu appears right of the Special menu. Once you create a desktop printer icon, you can print using traditional techniques or by dragging a document icon to a desktop printer icon.

Desktop printers add new printing features and replace Print Monitor, affectionately known to those of us who hate it as Print Monster. To see documents queued to a printer, double-click the corresponding desktop printer. The new printing features enable you to put a print job on hold, see a "print preview" of any queued job (just double-click the job), remove a print job, start printing again on any page, drag a print job to the Finder for storage, drag a job to a different desktop printer so it can print to the corresponding real life printer, and more.

Using a desktop printer, you can "share" a real printer, much as you would share a hard disk (select the icon and choose Sharing from the File menu). You can also password protect printers, though this works best on networks where everyone runs GX.

If you set up more than one desktop printer, one printer becomes the default in the Page Setup and Print dialog boxes. The default printer has a heavy outline, and you can make any printer the default by selecting its icon and choosing Set Default Printer from the Printing menu.

If you only have one or two printers, the desktop printer interface works well, but if you have access to many printers, you won't want a million printer icons cluttering your desktop. Since you can't store the icons anywhere else, I expect a number of utilities will show up to assist people in managing desktop printers. One possible (but inelegant) strategy for coping with too many desktop printers is to pile the icons one on top of the other in a corner somewhere and then organize the aliases neatly in the Apple menu.

New Page Setup and Print Dialog Boxes -- The basic Page Setup dialog box offers a More Choices button and four basic options - orientation, scale (formerly called reduction), desktop printer (or any installed driver, and paper size (including any custom size that you set up in the PaperType Editor - more on that in Part II).

If you click the More Choices button, the button turns into a Fewer Choices button and the dialog box offers an interface reminiscent of the System 6 Control Panel. You might see additional page setup choices, either from the active program or from a GX extension.

A number of familiar Page Setup options have retired, and I say good riddance to Larger Print Area, Font Substitution, and Unlimited Downloadable Fonts (GX fonts download much more efficiently to the printer, so there should never be a problem with the printer not having enough RAM to accommodate them).

The new Print dialog box also has a System 6 Control Panel interface. "Fewer Choices" mode is straightforward, and should take care of the options that most people want most of the time. But after you click the More Choices button, you can set a wide array of options, which can come from the current application or from a GX extension. Perhaps the most intriguing option controls how a large image prints if it doesn't fit on one page - you can crop the bottom and right so the image fits on one page, tile the image so it prints on more than one page, or scale it to fit. Other interesting features include setting the print time for a document and indicating that a document is urgent and should print before other queued documents.

Before I began playing with QuickDraw GX, I figured it would take me a half hour or so to write up an article for TidBITS; instead, after many hours, I'm still learning more and I've written enough information to fill an entire issue. So, instead of running one monster-sized article, I'm breaking this article into one (or more) additional articles. Tune in next week for a look at QuickDraw GX fonts - the coolest part of QuickDraw GX - and for a peek at the various utilities that come with QuickDraw GX (a digital document maker, a utility for turning GX off, a new LaserWriter Utility, and so on).

If you have experience with QuickDraw GX and have run into a quirk, snafu, or problem, I'd like to hear from you. Or, if you bravely installed the beta on seventy Macs printing to ten different printers and miraculously had no problems (or none you couldn't solve easily), I'd like to know about that as well. Be warned, I probably won't offer any solutions, but I'd like to get a better feel for GX's overall stability.

Ares Software Corporation -- 415/578-9090
Manhattan Graphics -- 914/725-2048
Pixar -- 510/236-4000
Peirce Software -- 800/828-6554 -- 408/244-6554
408/244- 6882 (fax) -- <peirce@aol.com>

Information from:
Pierce Guide to GX Printing, a free paper from Peirce Software.
Contact Peirce Software (see above) to request a copy.
Getting Started with QuickDraw GX (an installation guide in the
Peirce Print Tools software package)
"Inside QuickDraw GX Fonts," by Erfert Fenton, Macworld (Oct-94,
pg. 122). (An excellent article!)
Apple propaganda

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What a week! The more I learn about GX, the less it turns out that I (or other people) know. I had hoped to explain GX fonts this week, but I'm holding off for next week in hopes of presenting more complete informationShow full article

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What a week! The more I learn about GX, the less it turns out that I (or other people) know. I had hoped to explain GX fonts this week, but I'm holding off for next week in hopes of presenting more complete information. This week I'm going to talk about a number of the utilities that come with QuickDraw GX and explain how they work and why (if you use GX) you'd care. Note that if you didn't read Part I in TidBITS-243, some of Part II won't make sense.

Turning GX Off -- From the behind-the-scenes software standpoint, QuickDraw GX prints so differently from previous methods that you cannot mix and match GX and non-GX methods. As a result, once you install QuickDraw GX, you have two main printing options:

• Use a QuickDraw GX printer driver and print with QuickDraw GX turned on. If you print with GX on, you get to take advantage of the new GX Page Setup and Print dialog boxes, the desktop printers, and so on, which I explained in Part I of this article. On the other hand, you cannot then take advantage of special features offered by the PPDs that go with the PostScript 8.x non-GX printer drivers (such as the PSPrinter, LaserJet, and LaserWriter drivers). In the future, the PPD features should be built into or provided with the GX drivers, but for now, if you need those PPD features, you probably need to turn GX off.

• If you don't have a GX driver for a printer (or fax modem) that you want to print to, turn GX off. There are a number of gotcha's here, so pay attention if you think you might install GX, but also might need to turn it off some of the time.

QuickDraw GX Helper -- There are two ways to turn off QuickDraw GX. The complete way involves restarting and using an extension manager to disable the QuickDraw GX extension. If you reboot with GX off, the Chooser shows non-GX drivers, you can use Print Monitor, and printing goes exactly as it did before you installed GX. Alternately, if you're lucky, you can use the QuickDraw GX Helper utility, a System extension that adds a command called Turn Desktop Printing Off to the Apple menu. Using QuickDraw GX Helper can either be an elegant solution or a complete waste of time.

To turn off GX using QuickDraw GX Helper, you go to the Apple menu and choose Turn Desktop Printing Off. The command then conveniently metamorphoses into a Turn Desktop Printing On command, and you get a message proposing an alternate, non-GX printer driver. For as-of-yet unknown reasons, on my Mac, Turn Desktop Printing Off does not appear in the Apple menu unless I am in a non-GX-savvy application (such as WriteNow 3.0, Excel 4.0, Nisus 3.4, and so on). I don't know if QuickDraw GX Helper only works in non-GX-savvy programs or if this problem is peculiar to my setup (System 7.1.2 on a Power Mac 7100).

In any event, everyone should run into the oddball problem that you only get one choice for that proposed alternate printer driver, and that choice is based on your current default desktop printer icon. For example, just for fun, I installed every ImageWriter driver that I have. With GX on, I made a serial ImageWriter correspond to the default printer icon, launched Nisus 3.4, and turned off desktop printing. The Mac offered to make ImageWriter 2.7 the default driver, so I accepted the option and checked out what changed. Here's what I found:

• In Nisus, I could print using the ImageWriter driver version 2.7.

• I was still signed up to use the ImageWriter GX driver in all other applications.

• My Chooser still only gave me access to GX drivers.

• The reason QuickDraw GX Helper offered me the 2.7 printer driver was that the driver's icon name (IW 2.7) fell earlier in the alphabet than the other Image Writer drivers that I installed (IW 6.0, IW 7.0, and IW 7.1). This seems a strange way to determine which driver you get when you turn GX off, since chances are you'd want to use the latest installed version, not the earliest. On the other hand, once you know that QuickDraw GX Helper picks the first driver it encounters alphabetically, you can rename your drivers so it picks the one you want to use. For example, when I tried this same procedure, but with LaserWriter GX as driver that goes with the default printer, the Turn Desktop Printing Off command could have chosen from drivers named LaserWriter, LaserWriter 6.0, LaserWriter 7.2, or LaserWriter 8.1.1. It chose LaserWriter, which happened to be the icon name of LaserWriter version 7.0.

Although the GX Helper seems like a reasonable idea, it doesn't let you access printer drivers that do not have matching GX drivers (such as the DeskWriter, whose GX driver is expected in a few weeks, and which is reportedly not the recently-released version 6.0). Since one of the main reasons you'd want to turn GX off is to print with a non-GX driver, it seems that Apple missed the boat with QuickDraw GX Helper. Nice try, poor execution. Let's now look briefly at the other QuickDraw GX utilities.

Portable Digital Document Maker -- This item works much like a printer driver (you choose the PDD Maker GX driver in the Chooser and turn it into a desktop printer in exactly the same way), except that when you print to it, you create a document on disk, which Apple calls a "portable digital document" (PDD). When you create a PDD, you indicate to what extent the fonts should be preserved in the document, with choices for all fonts, non-standard fonts (all fonts except Times, Helvetica, Courier, Symbol, Palatino, Geneva, New York, Monaco, and Chicago), or no fonts. The document can be viewed and printed from any Macintosh running QuickDraw GX, and (assuming the fonts work out properly) it looks fine. You can't do anything with a PDD except print or view it. On my Mac, PDDs opened in SimpleText. Although I could read and print a PDD, the lack of a Find or Copy feature makes PDDs of limited utility. In random testing using "standard" fonts but saving with All Fonts chosen, the PDD Maker turned a 9K SimpleText document into a 54K PDD, and a 23K Word 6 document turned into a 117K document. Neither Nisus 3.4 nor WriteNow 3.0 could print to it at all - they aren't sufficiently GX-savvy.

Especially since options for printing to an EPS or PostScript file have disappeared, it seems that an important use of PDDs will be for bringing files to service bureaus - if you preserve the fonts in the PDD, the bureau won't require the fonts in order to output the job. It will be interesting to see how the PDDs will affect or compete with Adobe Acrobat, Common Ground, and Replica, all of which do much the same thing.

PaperType Editor -- This program enables you to create custom paper sizes, which then show up as options in your Page Setup dialog box, right along with Letter and Legal.

LaserWriter Utility -- QuickDraw GX comes with LaserWriter Utility 7.7 for downloading fonts and PostScript documents and the like, and you must use that version if you have QuickDraw GX turned on.

New color controls -- QuickDraw GX completely changes the interface used to pick a desktop or highlight color. The old method involves a color wheel - you've probably seen it at one time or another - one way to see it is to open the General (or General Controls) control panel, and then double-click one of the eight desktop pattern color squares. The new method lets you select different color picking methods. The Apple HSL method resembles the old color wheel, but the Apple RGB makes it easier to see and anticipate how red, green, and blue will work together to form different colors.

QuickDraw GX Extensions -- A GX Extension is a third-party add-on of some sort, and it enables you to take advantage of one or more cool printing capabilities, such as making a watermark or printing thumbnails. At this time, the main examples of GX Extensions appears to be Peirce Print Tools, which I've reviewed later in this issue.

Now that you know how to turn GX off and about a few of the related utilities, stay tuned for next week, when I'll write about GX fonts.

Information from:
Pierce Guide to GX Printing, a free paper from Peirce Software.
Contact Peirce Software (see above) to request a copy.
Getting Started with QuickDraw GX (an installation guide in the
Peirce Print Tools software package)
"Inside QuickDraw GX Fonts," by Erfert Fenton, Macworld (Oct-94,
pg. 122). (An excellent article!)
Apple propaganda

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This article is the third and last in the TidBITS QuickDraw GX mini-series. This part introduces QuickDraw GX fonts, pointing out amazing features and potential problems. If you've owned a Mac forever, you probably remember the old-style font world of bitmapped fonts, downloadable PostScript fonts, and (toward the end of the 80s) DeskWriter fontsShow full article

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This article is the third and last in the TidBITS QuickDraw GX mini-series. This part introduces QuickDraw GX fonts, pointing out amazing features and potential problems.

If you've owned a Mac forever, you probably remember the old-style font world of bitmapped fonts, downloadable PostScript fonts, and (toward the end of the 80s) DeskWriter fonts. The first big font shake-up came in the early 90s when Apple released TrueType, and Adobe not only shared the specifications for how to create Type 1 fonts but also released Adobe Type Manager (ATM). Font management became more complex, but fonts became more flexible and fun, especially for people using QuickDraw printers. QuickDraw GX has ushered in a second big font shake-up, and everything font-related has been thrown topsy-turvy. The parts are up in the air now; they should shake down soon and then we'll see what works and what doesn't.

GX Font Summary -- QuickDraw GX uses a variety of font types:

• True GX fonts, which have an impressive list of new capabilities. True GX fonts can be downloadable PostScript fonts or TrueType fonts.

• Regular TrueType fonts, which do not need to be converted.

• Type 1 downloadable PostScript fonts, which must be converted before they can be used with a GX printer driver. I haven't found any information about Type 3 fonts.

• Bitmaps are not necessary, but I haven't figured out if they are still desirable under some circumstances.

True GX fonts, regular TrueType fonts, and converted Type 1 downloadable PostScript fonts look identical from the Finder- the icons look the same, and the Get Info window provides no clues. If you try the transition to GX, make a note of what's what, just in case you need to know (see the devil's advocate section later in this article).

True GX fonts -- I made up the term "true GX fonts" to refer to fonts specially designed to offer QuickDraw GX features. True GX fonts have built-in smarts that enormously extend their features and flexibility. Users no longer need attempt to follow typesetting conventions using inadequate fonts and software features; instead the fonts follow the conventions on their own. GX fonts can contain details about kerning, tracking, width, weight, and more. For example, when you type "TidBITS" using a GX font, the "i" might automatically tuck under the "T", according to specifications built into the font. As another bonus, if you rotate, stretch, or twist text written using GX fonts you can edit the text in its stylized state.

Before GX, fonts for languages such as English, German, and Spanish had room for 256 characters (the Mac uses about thirty of those characters for line breaks and the like, not for text), and few applications supported the more populated "double-byte" fonts required by some alphabets, most notably those used in Asian languages. In contrast, a GX font can contain 65,000 glyphs. Think of a glyph as a shape that could be an entire character or only part of a character. For example, the character "e" might be represented by four different glyphs, and each glyph might make the "e" look different, depending on where the "e" falls in a paragraph or sentence. Or, if the "e" needs to be accented, the accented "e" might be created by combining more than one glyph, perhaps one for the "e" and one for the accent. You could also have uppercase and small caps versions, as well as special ornamental versions.

65,000 glyphs accommodates most (if not all) written languages and allows font designers to add fractions, ligatures, special flourishes and embellishments, and more. Check out pages 530-532 of the new fifth edition of Peachpit's "Macintosh Bible" to see great examples of special GX features in Skia and Hoefler Text, true GX fonts which come with QuickDraw GX.

The Catch -- True GX fonts sound too good to be true, and currently - for most people - they are. Although (in theory) you can use a true GX font from any program, you cannot take advantage of the special GX features unless you use a program that supports them. From what I've heard, Pixar has the only third-party, shipping program that supports true GX fonts; the program, Pixar Typestry 2, is a font animation and rendering program, and it runs in native or 68K mode. Several companies have announced plans to support true GX fonts, including: Ares Software in Font Chameleon, Manhattan Graphics in the upcoming Ready,Set,Go! GX, version 6.5; and SoftPress Systems, in a new product called UniQorn. (Find out more about UniQorn in the 12-Sep-94 issue of MacWEEK, on page 20.) I expect that as time goes on, additional companies will jump on the GX-font bandwagon.

Apple's SimpleText also supports true GX fonts. Salman Abdulali <sabdulal@black.clarku.edu> had a chance to play around with SimpleText 1.1.1, and he wrote, "If you print one of the new GX fonts from SimpleText 1.1.1, you get automatic ligatures and curly quotes. Printing a document with Apple Chancery leads to more surprises. The first letter of a paragraph has the swashes. Several other characters take on special shapes depending on their positions . None of these features show up onscreen, but you can see them in either a hard copy or in a portable digital document." SimpleText 1.1 also appears to support true GX fonts; I don't know if 1.0 does.

I gather that GX font development tools make it reasonably easy to throw together a font containing only a few GX capabilities. Evidently, the Font Consortium (a group comprised of interested developers, including several of the big font foundries) is putting together a set of guidelines for what features a GX font should have and attempting to create a multiple-platform font standard that builds on GX technology (no telling what exactly "multiple platform font standard" means, but it sounds like an excellent topic for lengthy committee meetings).

http://www.info.apple.com/

Regular TrueType Fonts -- You can still use TrueType fonts under QuickDraw GX. TrueType fonts don't get converted and work whether you have GX on or off.

Downloadable PostScript Fonts -- Downloadable PostScript fonts that are not true GX fonts must be converted into GX fonts before you can use them with QuickDraw GX. Converting a downloadable PostScript font does not endow it with true-GX-font capabilities, but it does make it so documents using the font print with QuickDraw GX on (definitely an advantage). If you print with an unconverted downloadable Type 1 PostScript font, you get a mysterious error and no printout.

When you install QuickDraw GX, the installer takes a copy of all Type 1 downloadable PostScript fonts in the Fonts and Extensions folders and converts them into QuickDraw GX fonts. It places the original downloadable PostScript fonts in a folder called Archived Type 1 Fonts.

The Type 1 Enabler -- QuickDraw GX comes with an application (called Type 1 Enabler) that can convert downloadable PostScript fonts into GX fonts. The Enabler was written by Adobe, and it can convert all fonts in a folder or all fonts on a disk. It's great that you can convert the fonts, but the utility fails if you look at it cross-eyed. I had problems with the Enabler failing whenever it encountered a suitcase containing bitmaps for more than one font.

The Enabler caused Bob Arthur <barthur@aol.com> to throw in the towel on GX. He wrote, "If the Enabler encounters an error, such as a font suitcase containing a non-Type 1 font, it stops dead. You then have to quit the Enabler, remove the offending font suitcase from the folder, and start all over again. Until the next error. The Enabler even gives an error if it finds an already-enabled suitcase!"

Evidently the Type 1 Enabler that comes with QuickDraw GX is slow - it took five to ten seconds per font for me on a Power Mac 7100, and you can evidently get a faster version through various online services or the Adobe BBS at 408/562-6839. Unfortunately the file is not available on <ftp.adobe.com>.

Adobe Type Manager -- If you use Adobe Type Manager (ATM), you must upgrade to version 3.7 or later. Version 3.7 comes with QuickDraw GX, but if you have a Power Mac, you may want the native version (see the MailBIT above). Using Adobe Type Manager requires that you pay attention when you turn off QuickDraw GX. A source at Adobe pointed out that Adobe Type Manager 3.7 and 3.8 fail to print GX-style PostScript fonts (true GX or converted to GX) if you print with GX off but with ATM on. In my own testing, GX-style fonts did print with GX off and ATM off.

Devil's advocate questions -- A few people wrote in to ask what happens if you print with a GX font, but without GX. It seemed a worthy question, so I rebooted with QuickDraw GX off to see what would happen when printing both true GX fonts and converted PostScript fonts.

At first I thought I had a problem because I couldn't print in the background, but then I discovered the cause of the problem - although I cannot swear to it, I believe that the GX installer deleted Print Monitor; hence, background printing failed. With Print Monitor installed, I printed fine using PSPrinter 8.1 and LaserWriter 7.2 (with background printing on or off) from two non-GX-savvy applications - Nisus 3.4 and Word 5.1. I also had no problems with Word 6, which supports GX printing (but not the fonts).

My success with WriteNow 3.0 was limited. WriteNow crashed when I attempted to format text in the PostScript true GX Tekton (a font that comes with QuickDraw GX) and the PostScript converted Katfish (a font from Letraset's newest collection of Fontek display faces). On the other hand, WriteNow worked with Hoefler Text and Hoefler Text Ornament (both true TrueType GX fonts that come with QuickDraw GX) or with a converted PostScript font called Cursive. (Cursive comes from Educational Fontware, and teachers use it to prepare materials that help students learn handwriting.) My problem sounds similar to one Salman Abdulali passed on. "WriteNow 4.02 crashes with a Type 1 error if you use a PostScript Type 1 font converted to GX format. This includes the Tekton font bundled with QuickDraw GX. The other TrueType GX fonts (Apple Chancery, Skia, Hoefler Text) work without problems."

I did not test GX fonts on a Mac running an older version of the System (such as System 7.0 or 6.0.7). If I had a deadline to meet related to a converted or true GX font working with an older System version, I'd test it well before the deadline.

Another issue that some people will want to check is what happens to the placement of printed characters if you create a document using a converted PostScript GX font (such as Futura) and then print the document using a non-converted version of the font. Although you should get the same results, I've heard rumors that characters shapes or spacing may change slightly.

Similarly, everyone who uses type professionally wants to know if they can take documents that use GX fonts to service bureaus and have the printing process go smoothly. I don't have an answer, but it's a good question, and perhaps I'll follow-up with better information.

Wrap-Up -- This ends my preliminary look at QuickDraw GX, though I suspect future TidBITS issues will have updates. If the Macintosh had shipped for the first time in 1994, and all Macs shipped with big hard disks, 20 MB of RAM onboard, QuickDraw GX, and all drivers, fonts, and programs were GX-savvy, everyone would rave about the innovative new Macintosh and its amazing font technology. Unfortunately, the transition to QuickDraw GX is going to be awkward (or impossible) for many people, but the nature of the computer industry is to constantly push the envelope on what can be done. It's refreshing to see Apple pushing hard and shipping something new.

Adobe -- 415/961-4400
Ares Software Corporation -- 415/578-9090
Educational Fontware, Inc. -- 800/806-2155 -- 206/842-2155
<davethompson@dbug.org>
Manhattan Graphics -- 914/725-2048
Letraset -- 800/343-8973
Pixar -- 510/236-4000 -- 510/236-0388 (fax)
SoftPress Ltd. (U.K.) -- 44-993-882588 -- 44-993-883970 (fax)

Information from:
Getting Started with QuickDraw GX (an installation guide in the
Peirce Print Tools software package)
"Inside QuickDraw GX Fonts," by Erfert Fenton, Macworld (Oct-94,
pg. 122). (An excellent article!)
Apple propaganda
Pixar propaganda

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