[OpenFontLibrary] [GFD] Re: [ft-devel] new CFF engine

[Barry Schwartz]

On 1 May 2013, at 16:44, Claus Eggers Sørensen <clauses at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great, but why was this work done?

vernon adams <vern at newtypography.co.uk> skribis:
> So (their) fonts would look better rendered on screens? 

I would assume they did it to advance the state of the art and support
human progress. For years I’ve been wanting them to do this for
exactly that reason. Also Google asked Adobe nicely (I assume),
because Google wanted to advance the state of the art, support human
progress, and make money doing so.

It is not good to withhold knowledge of how to render fonts well, when
that’s not even a source of income due to the withholding, and when
obviously most of the rest of the industry hasn’t the vaguest clue how
to render a font, and causes extensive damage by trying
(unsuccessfully) to foist that job onto font designers.

Unsurprisingly this also makes good business sense. Perhaps full
openness a lot sooner could have prevented the existence of TrueType
in the first place.