This article, Fonts on Macintosh , describes current and historical practices regarding the Apple Macintosh’s approach to typefaces, including font management and fonts included with each system revision.
Fonts in Mac OS X
The primary system font in Mac OS X (all versions) is Lucida Grande. For labels and other small text, 10 pt Lucida Grande is typically used. Lucida Grande is almost identical in appearance to the prevalent Windows font Lucida Sans, but contains a much richer variety of glyphs.
Mac OS X ships with a number of high-quality typefaces, for a number of different scripts, licensed from several sources. According to Apple, Mac OS X "includes over $10,000 worth of high quality Roman, Japanese and Chinese fonts". It also supports sophisticated font techniques, such as ligatures and filtering.
Many of the classic Mac typefaces included with previous versions are still part of Mac OS X, including the serif typefaces New York, Palatino, and Times, the sans-serif Charcoal and Chicago, Monaco, Geneva and Helvetica. Courier, a monospaced font, also remained.
In the initial publicly released version of Mac OS X (March 2001), font support for scripts was limited to what was provided by Lucida Grande and a few fonts for the major Japanese scripts. With each major revision of the OS, fonts supporting additional scripts have been added.
Zapfino is a calligraphic typeface designed by and named after renowned typeface designer Hermann Zapf for Linotype. Zapfino utilizes advanced typographic features of the AAT "morx" table format, and is included in OS X partially as a technology demo. Ligatures and character variations are extensively used. The font is based on a calligraphic example by Zapf in 1944. The version included with Mac OS X is a single weight. Since then, Linotype has introduced “Linotype Zapfino Extra” which includes the additional “Forte” weight and even more options and alternates.
Several of the GX fonts that Apple commissioned and originally shipped with System 7.5 were ported to use Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) instead (see below) and shipped with Mac OS X 10.2 and v10.3. Hoefler Text, Apple Chancery and Skia are examples of fonts of this line of heritage. Other typefaces were licensed from the general offerings of leading font vendors.
The LastResort font is a font that is invisible to the end user, but is used by the system to display reference glyphs in the event that real glyphs needed to display a given character are not found in any other available font. The symbols provided by the LastResort font place glyphs into categories based on their location in the Unicode system and provide a hint to the user about which font or script is required to view unavailable characters. Designed by Apple and extended by Michael Everson of Evertype for Unicode 4.1 coverage, the symbols adhere to a unified design. The glyphs are square with rounded corners with a bold outline. In the left and right sides of the outline, the Unicode range that the character belongs to is given using hexadecimal digits. Top and bottom are used for one or two descriptions of the Unicode block name. A symbol representative of the block is centered inside the square. The typeface used for the text cutouts in the outline is Chicago, otherwise not included with Mac OS X. The LastResort font has been part of Mac OS since version 8.5, but the limited success of Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI) on the classic Mac OS means that only users of Mac OS X are regularly exposed to it.
Of the fonts that ship with Mac OS X, Lucida Grande has the broadest repertoire. This font provides a relatively complete set of Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Thai and Greek letters and an assortment of common symbols. All in all, it contains a bit more than 2800 glyphs (including ligatures).
In Mac OS X v10.3 ("Panther"), a font called Apple Symbols was introduced. It complements the set of symbols from Lucida Grande, but also contains a number of glyphs only accessible by glyph ID (that is, they have not been assigned Unicode codepoints). A hidden font called .Keyboard contains 92 visible glyphs, most of which appear on Apple keyboards. The symbols are not slanted like they are on most Apple keyboards.
Font management and capabilities
System 6.0.8 and earlier
Originally the Macintosh QuickDraw system software supported only bitmapped fonts. The original font set was custom designed for the Macintosh and were intended to provide a highly legible screen display. These system fonts were named after large cities, e.g. New York, Chicago, and Geneva.
Bitmapped fonts were stored as resources within the System file. A utility called Font/DA Mover was used to install fonts into or extract fonts out of the System file. Fonts could also be embedded into Macintosh applications and other file types, such as a HyperCard stack. Fonts that were not being used were stored in a suitcase file.
The Apple ImageWriter printer supported a higher resolution mode where bitmap fonts double the size of the screen resolution were automatically substituted for 'near letter quality' printing. (For example, a 24-point bitmapped font would be used for 12-point printing.) This feature was sometimes called two-times font printing. Some later Apple QuickDraw-based laser printers also supported four-times font printing where bitmaps quadruple the screen size were used for letter quality output.
With the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter and support for PostScript-compatible printers, the Mac system software initially supported outline fonts for printing only. These outline fonts could be printed in letter quality at any size. PostScript fonts came with two files; a bitmap font was installed into the System file, and an outline font file was stored in the System Folder. Some of the bitmapped 'city' fonts would be automatically substituted for PostScript fonts by the printer driver. Commercial typefaces such as Times and Helvetica began to be distributed by Apple, Adobe Systems, and others.
The widely-used Adobe Type Manager (ATM) system extension allowed PostScript outline fonts to be both displayed on screen and used with non-PostScript printers. This allowed for true WYSIWYG printing in a much broader set of circumstances than the base system software, however with a noticeable speed penalty, especially on Motorola 68000-based machines.
Apple later added support for TrueType outline fonts through a freely available system extension, providing similar functionality as ATM. Apple also provided TrueType outline files for the bitmapped 'city' system fonts, allowing letter quality WYSIWYG printing of those fonts.
A reboot was required after installing new fonts unless using a font management utility such as Suitcase, FontJuggler, or MasterJuggler.
System 7 – Mac OS 9
A highly touted feature of System 7 was integrated TrueType outline font support, which also received industry support from Microsoft. Fonts were still stored in the System file but could now be installed using drag-and-drop. To install new fonts, one had to quit all running applications.
Despite this, Adobe Type Manager and PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to be widely used, especially for professional desktop publishing. Eventually Adobe released a free version of their utility, called ATM Light.
In System 7.1, a separate Fonts folder appeared in the System Folder. Fonts were automatically installed when dropped on the System Folder, and became available to applications after they were restarted. Font resources were generally grouped together in suitcase files. However, rules for storing printer fonts varied greatly between different system, printer and application configurations until the advent of the new Fonts folder. Typically, they had to be stored directly in the System Folder or in the Extensions Folder.
System 7.5 added the QuickDraw GX graphics engine. TrueType GX supported ligatures and other advanced typography features. However very little software supported these features, and PostScript remained the standard for desktop publishing software.
Starting with Mac OS 8.5, the operating system supported data fork fonts, including Windows TrueType and OpenType. In addition, Apple created a new format, called data-fork suitcases. At the same time, support was added for TrueType collection files, conventionally with the filename extension '.ttc' .
System versions 7 to 9 supported a maximum of 128 font suitcases and each suitcase could store multiple fonts.
Starting with version 7.1, Apple unified the implementation of non-roman script systems in a programming interface called WorldScript. WorldScript I was used for all one-byte character sets and WorldScript II for two-byte sets. Support for new script systems was added by so-called Language Kits. Some kits were provided with the system software, and others were sold by Apple and third parties. Application support for WorldScript was not universal, since support was a significant task. Good international support gave a marketing edge to word-processing programs such as Nisus Writer and programs using the WASTE text engine, since Microsoft Word was not WorldScript aware.
In 8.5, full Unicode support was added to Mac OS through an AP
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