Today marks 30 years since Microsoft adopted the TrueType font technology in Windows. It is a date I remember very well working behind the scenes on our font technologies at Microsoft and preparing for this announcement. On September 19th, 1989, Bill Gates and John Sculley, the CEO of Apple Computer, announced on stage at the Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference held in San Francisco, a cross-license agreement for outline font technology and printer software. Just five days earlier the agreement had been signed, so the announcement was clearly a surprise to the industry, especially with Apple having an outstanding 1988 lawsuit against Microsoft for the look-and-feel of Windows. Apple’s outline font technology, at that time codenamed Royal, had been previously announced several months earlier in May of 1989. The opening paragraph of the press release accompanying the announcement covers some of the basics:

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — SEPTEMBER 19, 1989 — Apple Computer, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation today announced a cross-license agreement for outline font technology and printer software to be standard across the Apple® Macintosh® and Microsoft® OS/2 Presentation Manager platforms. Microsoft will license Apple’s outline font technology for inclusion in future versions of Microsoft OS/2 Presentation Manager. Apple will license printer software from Microsoft for implementation in future versions of the Apple LaserWriter® printer. The Microsoft printer software incorporates the Apple font format.

It would ultimately take another three months before Apple and Microsoft determined the name for these two technologies; TrueType and TrueImage. Many other names were bandied about, including SymFont for the type technology, and my favorites, Impression and Expression for the type and print technology, respectively. During those months after the announcement, Microsoft and Apple engineers worked closely together on integration. Interestingly, just shy of a month after the announcement, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area. The building that the Apple font team occupied had more damage than other Apple facilities, but work was able to proceed.

The agreement came about from a conversation between Jean-Louis Gassée, the President of Apple Products and Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft, which is described in the recent Type Magazine article, The Faces of Microsoft. Nathan had spent much of the previous year investigating outline font technologies, getting demonstrations from big and small companies, and doing a deep analysis of the techniques currently being used in the industry for font rendering. After some time, Microsoft was poised to use Intellifont, created by CompuGraphic, a font technology that had recently be selected by Hewlett-Packard for their printer engines. But the conversations around TrueType between Jean-Louis and Nathan ultimately led to a better technological choice for Microsoft, Apple, and the industry.

In hindsight, it is interesting to note in the press release that Microsoft planned to ship TrueType with OS/2 Presentation Manager. At the time of the announcement I was working on font technologies for Presentation Manager and we were enabling the plumbing for installing new font rasterizers like TrueType. In the end, though, Microsoft’s relationship with IBM fell apart, with IBM ultimately choosing to use Adobe’s ATM font technology for OS/2 Presentation Manager. Apple was the first to ship TrueType as an extension to Macintosh System 6 in March of 1991 and then it became an integral part of Macintosh System 7 in May of 1991. Microsoft had hoped to ship TrueType as a small update to Windows 3.0 in early 1991 called Windows 3.1, but as the project grew in scope, Windows 3.1 grew dramatically and ended up shipping in April of 1992.

The Press Release goes on to say:

The outline font format is an open standard that all hardware, software and font vendors can support. Nearly a dozen leading type vendors and as many software developers have already announced support for this font standard. Today’s agreement between Apple and Microsoft means that these type vendors will easily be able to support both the Macintosh and OS/2 Presentation Manager.

Apple’s font technology includes the specifications for a powerful instruction set that controls characters for printing or screen display at low resolution, while preserving excellent quality at high resolution.

Outline fonts are mathematical descriptions of text characters that allow the computer to accurately display text at any size on any screen or printer. Bit-map fonts, widely implemented in current screen output devices, are device-specific and consequently cannot be easily displayed on different devices without severe limitations on memory and flexibility.

The “powerful instruction set that controls characters….” is, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the TrueType technology. Typographers and Type Engineers are able to write assembly language style mini-programs (sometimes called ‘hints’) that can do almost anything to optimize the character shapes. For example, the first time the letter ‘A’ is displayed on your screen, a little mini-program is run to adjust the shape for your screen or printer. Several years ago I created a set of instructions for a sample font called Selawik Variations that allows one to view data on the font, including the current point size used by the text. But, most importantly, the hints have played a critical role in making TrueType the best technology for making typefaces that perform exceptionally well on computer screens. At the time that TrueType was announced, most people thought that typefaces should only be previewed on computer displays, with the ultimate destination being printed on paper, for the optimal reading experience. Using these instructions or hints, we tuned the look of characters to be optimized for the media on which they are being displayed—screen or printer.

Microsoft’s first TrueType font project was developing the core fonts for Windows 3.1; Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. These were augmented with the release of the Microsoft TrueType Font Pack for Windows which included 44 additional fonts including the Lucida Super Family, and shipped simultaneously with Windows 3.1. What stands out with this project, is the amount of time we spent tuning the shape of every character to be the best it could be on the screen. We worked closely with the typographers at Monotype as well as the Microsoft typographer on the project, Robert Norton. This tuning process took almost two years. I travelled back and forth to the south of London where Monotype was located during this period, usually spending three weeks at Monotype and then one week back at Microsoft. (I should note that working at the Monotype facility felt like stepping back in time. The buildings were from the early twentieth century and it felt like we were in the middle of the Industrial Revolution. The people there were wonderful, clear experts in the domain of type and typography, and every day was a bit of a history lesson). As the project wrapped up, Microsoft started seriously promoting the quality of these new fonts. We showed them at font conferences, we showed them to the press, we also visited Jonathan Seybold, a influential pundit in the desktop publishing industry, at his Malibu California home/office and showed him what we were able to do with these fonts.

An “unfortunate” side-effect of the splendid work Microsoft did in promoting the core fonts was that the Press, with the release of Windows 3.1, ultimately attributed TrueType to Microsoft instead of Apple. Arguably, though, Apple was doing very little to promote TrueType while Microsoft was doing all the leg work and heavy lifting. (This, I believe, led to Apple not wanting to work with Microsoft on TrueType 2.0, which Apple eventually called TrueType GX, and consequently led Microsoft to develop and create TrueType Open). Overall, I think the quality of the core fonts speak for themselves as Times New Roman and Arial are still widely used today, almost 30 years after their creation.

The surprise announcement at Seybold by Microsoft and Apple also created a reverberation in the computer industry known as the Font Wars. Adobe’s CEO John Warnock took the stage at Seybold after the Gates and Scully announcement. In an impassioned speech he said, “That’s the biggest bunch of garbage and mumbo jumbo.” And, on the verge of tears, and referring to TrueType, he said, “What those people are selling you is snake oil!”. The Font Wars, which lasted from 1989 until the Microsoft and Adobe’s announcement of the OpenType font technology in 1996, was an era of people arguing the pros and cons of Adobe’s Type 1 technology vs. Apple and Microsoft’s TrueType. The Adobe camp initially responded to the announcement by publishing the specification of the Type 1 format, which had previously been proprietary to Adobe. They also created ATM (Adobe Type Manager) that allowed the Type 1 format to be displayed on screens on the Macintosh and later Windows. Most importantly, Adobe boasted that high-end RIPs (Raster Image Processors) would only work properly with Adobe’s Type 1. Meanwhile the Microsoft and Apple camp responded with the wide availability of TrueType on Windows and Macintosh, the openness of the specification (using the 1980’s definition of “open”), and the excellent quality of type that could be developed with TrueType for use on computer screens.

In the years since the announcement of TrueType, Microsoft has continued to enhance the core technology and the fonts for TrueType. In Windows 95 we added anti-aliasing support to TrueType. We created new fonts, Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, and yes, also Comic Sans MS, which were optimized to improve reading on the computer screen. These fonts became known as the Web Core Fonts, and when combined with the increase in reading from content on the Internet, led to a better and more comfortable on-screen reading experience. In response to Apple’s TrueType GX, we created TrueType Open, which today is known as OpenType Layout. This feature allows rich typographic layout for fonts and the ability to manage complex international scripts. In 1996 we worked with Adobe to create OpenType, which was essentially a rebranding of TrueType, bringing the best of Adobe and Microsoft’s technologies into the TrueType format. In 1998 we brought ClearType rendering to TrueType, which allowed print quality text on computer screens using the sub-pixel capabilities of LCD displays. In the early 2000’s we created more TrueType fonts with high quality screen text including, Palatino Linotype, Frutiger Linotype, Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Meiryo and others. We also developed the beautiful Gabriola and Aldhabi fonts and a typeface family designed with scientific input on text legibility called Sitka. In 2013 we created TrueType color fonts which helped to enable emoji characters. Most recently, we worked with Apple, Google, and Adobe to create Font Variations, which allows for very rich typographic capabilities with a small file or download footprint.

Thirty years of TrueType has spanned a significant portion of the computer industry. It is remarkable that TrueType fonts developed almost thirty years ago work as well, or even better today as when they first came out. It has also been highly impactful on my career as I’ve been continually involved since the beginning and I’ve grown and developed my skills alongside this technology. Looking forward, we will have many opportunities to improve TrueType as we investigate new ways of making reading more accessible for more people; empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.