PS End of an Era

My first computer printer, a LaserWriter IIf, came with 35 fonts. Regular, bold, italic and bold italic versions of Avant Garde, Courier, Helvetica, Helvetica Narrow, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Times Roman, and Bookman plus Symbol, Zapf Chancery, and Zapf Dingbats. And that was it. Since it was the early 1990s, those fonts were PostScript fonts (also known as Type 1). And for a long time, PostScript fonts were the backbone of pretty much every designers type library. They only worked on Macs, but, really, who cared? At that time, no one was really designing squat on a PC. And if you were, there was always TrueType, which worked across both platforms. As in, people on PCs used TrueType. Us Mac folks were, as I recall, pretty much in the PostScript-only camp.

I remember first hearing about OpenType in the early 2000s, and, within a few years, most designers that I knew had started to slowly migrate toward that standard. It was cross-platform (because by that point, playing nice with PC people was a good thing). Like TrueType, but unlike PostScript, OpenType didn’t require both screen and printer files. It was one size fits all. And still, PostScript hung in there.

Today, 30 years after it was introduced, I still have documents (and receive documents from clients) that contain PostScript fonts. Sometimes there is just no good alternative to the PostScript version. Or the files are just so old, and have been passed around for so long, that no one thought twice of using PostScript fonts here and there. PostScript was tried and true, and I kind of figured it would be around forever. At least that was the story I was telling myself. Until about a year ago, when I spotted the first sign of the impending doom. I received a notice from Extensis with this message “Adobe announced that Photoshop will discontinue support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in 2021. Here’s how it will affect your Extensis font management tools, and steps you can take.” Yikes. But that gave me just about a year to figure out what to do. And with COVID and everything else happening in 2020, the death of PostScript did not really make it too far onto my radar.

Then, I started getting notices this spring in my Adobe apps when I was opening docs containing PostScript fonts reminding me of that PostScript was truly going away. Old PDF files would be okay (since fonts are embedded), but, starting January 2023, users would no longer have the ability to create content (or edit content) with PostScript fonts. I quote “Type 1 fonts (also known as PostScript, PS1, T1, Adobe Type 1, Multiple Master, or MM) are a deprecated format within the font industry, replaced by the larger glyph sets and more robust technical possibilities of OpenType format fonts.” So harsh.

So that is it for PostScript. The end of an era. It was a good run. 30 years in computer time is a very, very long time, but, still, we designers do love our fonts. And for most of us that first love (at least electronically—don’t get me started on Letraset) was typeset in PostScript.