Episode 314: All About Fonts with Glenn Kowalski

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This week’s transcription is brought to you by Alectrona

James Smith:
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Tom Bridge:
Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins podcast. I’m your host, Tom Bridge. And Marcus, how are you today? That shirt is appropriately stripy.

Marcus Ransom:
It is appropriately stripy. This was a recent acquisition for those of who have seen me rather than just listen to me. I have a bit of a thing for stripy shirts and I found another one, but stripy shirts aside, I have been elbow deep in the insides of my coffee machine over the last few days trying to get that back up and working again.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, no.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, but it’s-

Tom Bridge:
There’s a coffee outage?

Marcus Ransom:
There was a coffee outage, which is fortunately being here in Melbourne when there is a local self-hosted coffee outage there, we have lots of redundancy and backup for good coffee and support groups.

Tom Bridge:
And serviette.

Marcus Ransom:
Exactly. But the flow meter on my coffee machine is now metering flow again, which is good. But then the downside was, as I was looking for spare parts that I’ve turned out, I didn’t actually need, I just needed to clean the gizzards of my coffee machine. I then discovered all of these additional accessories that I have not yet purchased for my coffee machine. So this might be an expensive week. I can celebrate the fact. Yeah, that’s a rough one. Need to spend money getting the coffee machine working again. I just needed to disassemble some parts so I can make up for that by spending four times what my actual coffee machine is worth on bits that may or may not make the coffee marginally better.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah. Well, there’s no amount of money too large to spend on delicious coffee.

Marcus Ransom:
Exactly.

Tom Bridge:
As the self-avowed coffee addict says, I recently had the pleasure of descaling my new cup one for the first time recently. It’s very handy there. There’s an excellent video on this, and their guidance is very clear. They’re like, look, we sell the boxes of filters in packs of 100 when you finish the box, descale your thing, and then head on towards life after that. And the first cup of coffee after I did the descaling though, was revolting. So I think I need to remember that you need to-

Marcus Ransom:
Needed more scale? Or needed less descale?

Tom Bridge:
Needed less descaler, I think is really what it came down to. Did not taste good. Had to run to toss it and run a second cup through. But this is coffee talk with Marcus and Tom and Charles, how are you today?

Charles Edge:
I’m good. I didn’t have any coffee today, so, you know.

Tom Bridge:
None at all? Are you feeling all right?

Charles Edge:
Yeah. Well, right now I have a glass of wine, so, you know.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, okay. Perfect. Yeah. Okay. As long as we’re not like abandoning all chemicals, I think we’ll be okay.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, yeah. A lot of water and then-

Tom Bridge:
A lot of water.

Charles Edge:
I regrettably-

Tom Bridge:
I’m on the water as well.

Charles Edge:
… didn’t turn the water… Yeah, I didn’t turn the water into wine. I opened a wine bottle.

Tom Bridge:
No, it is Sunday.

Marcus Ransom:
Not yet, Charles, not yet. The hair and the beard is growing back again.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. And how are you, Tom?

Tom Bridge:
A little road weary. We went up to New Jersey this weekend to visit my cousins. My, what is it, I think it’s my first cousin once removed. So my cousin’s son went through his bar mitzvah this weekend, and so congratulations, Magnus. And it was an awesome time. We got to see some family I hadn’t seen since pre-pandemic and had a great weekend. Didn’t love the drive too much. Friday, mostly just sat in traffic and what should have been three and a half hours was six and three quarters.

Charles Edge:
Ouch.

Tom Bridge:
And that was pretty hateful. So the we’re at the time of year where a little bit of raindrops fall out of the sky and everybody freaks out, starts dodging raindrops. Of course, we was not helped by the fact that some trees came down because we got a bunch of rain on Friday. So hilarity did ensue, but we’re through it. We’re on the other side. It was a great weekend, and now I’m back with you guys. So life is wonderful and we’ve got an incredible guest. Charles, will you introduce Glen?

Charles Edge:
Yeah, Glennis with us.

Glenn Kowalski:
Hello? Hello. Hello. I’m here.

Charles Edge:
So Glen, it might be better for you to introduce yourself because-

Glenn Kowalski:
Okay.

Charles Edge:
…I don’t think I would do you justice.

Glenn Kowalski:
Okay. Well, I’m Glen. GlennKowalski from MacLab, and yes, I’ve had my coffee today, and we recently had a coffee emergency as well, and-

Tom Bridge:
Oh no.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yes, we’ve gone through the cleaning and we have decided that we are not going to do the coffee machine cleaning anymore. We were going to for the French press.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, very nice. I do love a good French press.

Glenn Kowalski:
Well, also just because you don’t have to deal with the cleaning anymore. You just clean it. You just wash it every day and you don’t have to deal with a machine.

Tom Bridge:
Yes.

Glenn Kowalski:
Now the only problem is there was limited quantity that you can drink, but you do not have to deal with the machine anymore, no more of this solution, none of that.

Tom Bridge:
Yes. No, that’s pretty spectacular. And I was going to say I was a devotee of the French press for a while until my electric kettle broke. But yeah, I was going to say, and of course Marcus is going to be here to tell us that here in the States, we can’t do electric kettle because we only have what, 110 volt power. And that’s just apparently not enough for an electric kettle according to some.

Charles Edge:
But we do have a good pallet cleanser for your coffee taste buds or whatever, so we can talk about fonts. And recently I did a whole-

Tom Bridge:
Yes, that’s true.

Charles Edge:
…history podcast on the history of fonts, which was super fun for me and probably super boring for everyone else except the one guy who messaged me and said, “Hey, that was a fun episode.” And thanks for that.

Tom Bridge:
You, me and GlennFleischman, right?

Marcus Ransom:
I beg to different, but I also think there’s a segue you actually missed there, Charles, that having-

Tom Bridge:
Uh oh.

Marcus Ransom:
…started out working managing Maxi Design Studios, I would suggest that fonts are possibly one of the reasons coffee exists. Printers are the reason hard liquor exists, but managing fonts and coffee go hand in hand.

Glenn Kowalski:
Managing fonts can be tiring.

Tom Bridge:
Right?

Glenn Kowalski:
Yes.

Tom Bridge:
Well, I would say Mac admins have to manage all kind of things. We talk a lot about settings and features when it comes to device management, and you can certainly manage fonts through device management tools, kind of. But fonts are one of those things that can be important, and in fact, a security issue as well. For example, if a drug company uses the wrong font, they could base massive penalties from regulators, employees might send out materials with unlicensed fonts, which can get you big fines. And I guess in today’s episode, we’ll talk about what’s involved in font management, at least above and beyond the typical device methodology, and how to get the right fonts on the right devices and build sustainable workflows so teams can have access to such an important aspect of computing. And I do feel like my own journey with fonts began with the Mac Classic.
I remember printing lyrics to some songs my dad wrote and seeing the look on his face when he saw them in all these different fonts, because of course, the first time you got to use different fonts, you had to add all the fonts to each document because it was fun and-

Glenn Kowalski:
Of course.

Tom Bridge:
…interesting. And you had to underline every few words and italics every few words because it was new and cool. And over time we got Font/DA Mover and moved away from these bit mappy fonts and that classic OS. But those original fonts from Susan Care were amazing. San Francisco aside, I guess, but all the other big cities were cool. Chicago, et cetera. And Glenn-

Glenn Kowalski:
San Francisco, my favorite, the Ransom Letter fund.

Tom Bridge:
Well, That’s why I said San Francisco aside, but because it always did feel like a ransom letter, you nailed it. I never thought about it that way, but yeah. Anyways.

Charles Edge:
Hey, Geneva held up.

Tom Bridge:
But Glen, you’ve been in the Apple world for a long time. So for those who don’t know you, would you mind giving us a bit of an origin story, how you got into Apple and what your journey was like to get where you are today and maybe what it is you do today?

Glenn Kowalski:
Sure, sure. Well, I started out through being a musician, and I was just really taken by what the Mac could do through music. Actually, both my brothers had a Mac before I did, and one of my brothers had the Mac 512 and the other one had an Apple two. And my brother that had 512, he was already doing some MIDI with it, and I was like, whoa, “This is amazing stuff.” And I just had to get involved. So he helped me get a SE through his student… I got a student discount, and so I started getting involved with the Mac that way. Then not too long after that, my first wife, she was a graphic artist, and the Mac started appearing in design studios, and she had to learn how to use a Mac. And meanwhile, nobody knew how to use them in the studios.
They were just showing up and I knew how to use it. So she came home and she was like, “How do I do this thing? How do I use this thing?” And I was helping her do it, and she was going in and she knew how to use it. So eventually I joined forces with her, and we had a business where we did Page Layout and Cork Express, and PageMaker we were doing all this work for these design studios. They were subbing it out to us because they didn’t know how to do it.
So I did deal with fonts a lot in this work. I was also helping these studios, doing consulting work, helping them take care of the max. And little by little that work started taking over me doing layout work. So eventually we took the business and had two different departments. We had a design department and a consulting department, and eventually we split off both from a personal standpoint and a business standpoint and had two different businesses. And so 32 years later, here I am, and It’s been a long time, but still here, had a team and everything else. So that’s basically where I came from.

Tom Bridge:
I love that. I do feel like a lot of the people from who got into the Apple space in the eighties and nineties and even maybe the early two thousands came in from Arter music or working in a print shop. Those seemed to be the three big places where Mac admins emerged out of. And then over the maybe last 20 years, it seems to have been more from Apple stores and people with degrees who go to work for bigger companies bringing these things in.
But picking up from those good old battle font mover, font mover, sorry, days, how would you say font management has evolved over the years? And we could ask how fonts have evolved, but there’s just a kajillion fonts, so they’ve evolved in every way, shape and form imaginable. So maybe font management’s easier to talk about.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say that broadly speaking, it’s amazing how little it’s evolved. Maybe in the last few years it has changed, but designers are just now getting rid of their fonts that they have held onto since late eighties, nineties, but they still have them. But as far as the details of font management, there were some changes from Font/Da Mover. In system seven, we got drag and drop, we could drag and drop them into the system. Then we got a font folder in the system where we could drag them into that folder. And then when Mac 10 came around, we got the separate folders in library slash fonts and the user fonts. And then we had the classic environment, which if you had the fonts in there, you also had fonts active. So you had at least three places where they’d be active. And then you had the designers with the suitcase. So you have them active there too. You had fonts in so many places that would be active.

Charles Edge:
All over the place. Yeah.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah. So then early days you had the Adobe Type Manager, which was used to smooth out the display and also the printing, which was eventually made into the operating system, so that was part of the management too.

Tom Bridge:
The ability to double click them and have them automatically install was… I don’t remember exactly when that happened because I’ve never been in the document management side as much, but I remember all of a sudden realizing that I could just command O on a font file and now it’s installed and I can do whatever. But your point is really interesting about some of the designers just giving up some of their old fonts. I can’t tell you how many people that I worked with in the early two thousands, just when it was suddenly not cool to steal software who were also just realizing that it wasn’t cool to steal fonts.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah.

Tom Bridge:
And how many services that sprung up to detect unlicensed use of fonts in a programmatic crawlable fashion around the internet, have you seen any cases where, and no names of course, because that wouldn’t be appropriate, but have you seen any cases where people get in trouble for using the wrong fonts or the wrong sizes of fonts?

Glenn Kowalski:
I haven’t. And it seemed like a total just zoo with the fonts. The fonts were just everywhere, and designers just mean is proliferate crazy. And it’s not just a matter of the licensing also, it just gets really… You get corruption. And we used to have a service where we would take all the fonts in Design Studio and we’d say, “Okay, stop.” And we would take all the fonts and we would try to make sense of what they had, and we would throw away fonts that were just partial fonts and put things back together and then redistribute them all because it was just a mess. And we had no way of knowing what they had and what they didn’t have. And then other times we would just trash everything and they had to buy the whole library because it was just… And designers would bring things in and then it was just a mess.

Marcus Ransom:
I remember everybody starting, you’d have a new designer start at the studio and almost the first thing they’d do was they’d reach into their bag and pull out a zip drive or a Side Quest drive or something like that, and it’s like, “Ah, here’s all my fonts.” And they’d plug it into something and copy everything across. And I remember that that then changed a few years down the track where it was the same thing, but it was their MP3’s that they’d put on the studio music server that everyone had listen to. Same problem.

Tom Bridge:
But font files are so much smaller and a CD full of font files could be just thousands. And to Glen’s point about troubleshooting, if one of those farm files was corrupt, word might not load.

Glenn Kowalski:
Exactly.

Tom Bridge:
And good lucking finding it.

Marcus Ransom:
No that or macOS.

Tom Bridge:
Or macOS if it’s real bad.

Charles Edge:
Real bad, yeah.

Marcus Ransom:
Once we got to OS 10, I remember trying to explain to this audiovisual engineer that the way he’d tried to install a font was preventing the operating system from launching because he’d mucked about with one of the system fonts, and he was adamant that this was not the case and that there was something wrong with the hardware and he needed a new computer. And it was like, all right, try.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, you just double clicked on Times New Roman or something that is used there and interrupted the bootloader process. Yeah, I’ve seen that as well. I forgot about that a little more rarely. I had actually at one point built Gooey level automation to open Word and attempt to load the font menu because if there was a corrupt font, you could open word, but then the second you went to load the font menu because it was rendering the fonts in their native font to show you, which is awfully kind of Microsoft, but it would just blah.

Marcus Ransom:
It’s probably also worth explaining for people who haven’t worked in a creative industry that there’s a very big difference between what most Mac admins have had to do, which is install a font, “Hey, here’s our corporate font. We need to make sure this is on every machine,” is one problem in its own. But what you have to deal with when you’re got creatives and designers where they will want to have 16,000 fonts installed and running at all times, the operating system and the applications probably feel differently about that.
So what sort of goes into managing fonts rather than just straight installing and uninstalling?

Glenn Kowalski:
Well, I will say one good troubleshooting technique that we still use to this day, not as often because it doesn’t happen as much, but is using suitcase and or connect fonts is now what they call it. But when the designers had that, and they had a problem where the app wouldn’t launch. You would just say, okay, well deactivate all the fonts, and now does it launch? Okay, it launches. Okay, so now activate one font at a time until it doesn’t launch anymore. And there you go. There’s your bad font.

Charles Edge:
Tom always likes to split half troubleshooting.

Glenn Kowalski:
Right. Or whatever, something along those lines. What was the last one you activated? But it was real handy for that, and that was a really big thing. Now that the OS is a lot… Well, first of all, it’s a lot more forgiving for how many fonts you have loaded. You can really load hundreds of fonts now, provided their good, but it used to be that the number of fonts would really drag down the system and you know, would get in a big trouble if you had a hundred of fonts loaded, it would just be dogging your system down.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, yeah. I was going to say, I remember we had a couple of designers when I was… This is, God, 25 almost years ago where I was in-house and we’d go see the publishers inside NCE and hundreds and hundreds of typefaces included. Mixed formats, multiple versions of the same thing. And their system was running like a dog. And they were like, but if you touch one of my fonts, it is almost as if you have taken one of my children.

Charles Edge:
Some designers like swear by a copper plate gothic or some…

Tom Bridge:
Correct. Purijans.

Charles Edge:
If you take that one away, but then you’re like, “Did you pay for it? If you love it so much. Wait, how many logos did you make with that $2 font that you didn’t bother to pay for?

Tom Bridge:
Correct. We frequently would have to go to legal eventually and be like, “Susie, let help me out here. Can you go have the conversation about license agreements with the design team again?” And that’s usually where things were okay again for us for about six months. And nobody would install random fonts they found on the innerwebs or brought in on a discount or a CD or a zip drive. And yeah, that was wild. Those were wild era of MAC management.

Glenn Kowalski:
I think that the designers’ desires have a lot to do with how to manage fonts too, because it’s difficult to use MDM or other things, enforce management when you have designers that want to be whimsical or whatever and try things out. And it’s very difficult to have a strict guidelines unless it’s going to be a corporate environment where you have 10 fonts that are designated. So for the most part we’ve pretty much put what fonts are used just in the designer’s hands and just dealt with help, giving them the tools to manage them and just left it at that.

Charles Edge:
So is that, we’ve talked about designers a bunch and I think, yeah, they’re the ones who probably experiment most freely with fonts, but is that mostly who you work with is creative environments, or are there more industrial customers as well?

Glenn Kowalski:
We work with other customers, but the other customers outside of designers really don’t seem to care about font so much. They just use what’s supplied. At least that’s my experience, at least our customers.

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Tom Bridge:
It seems like a lot of device management involves third party products, and we’re all used to that now. And certainly I have committed in the cardinal sin in some designers’ eye of pushing out fonts with profiles. But what other options are available today for managing typefaces like this at scale?

Glenn Kowalski:
Well, I would just say that from a… I’m going to go back to designers again. I’m sorry. I’m going to say that it is moving towards cloud management with Adobe having you buy fonts from them from the cloud.

Tom Bridge:
Sure.

Glenn Kowalski:
From Creative Cloud, they’re trying to corner the market a little bit there because you buy Creative Cloud and then they offer you free fonts. So designer’s going to say…

Marcus Ransom:
Free quotes.

Glenn Kowalski:
Right.

Tom Bridge:
Free in kittens.

Glenn Kowalski:
Exactly. Free… Now, and this brings up the other subject of Postscript fonts not being supported by Adobe. So the designers-

Charles Edge:
Who effectively invented Postscript, by the way, so, amusing.

Glenn Kowalski:
So the designer says, oh, I can’t use a Postscript font anymore, so I’m going to have to use something else and I don’t want to have to buy something else. So Adobe offers fonts for no charge, as long as you have Creative Cloud and you can get them through Creative Cloud. But if you stop using Creative Cloud, then the font goes away.

Marcus Ransom:
If you’re trying to open up a file that someone has provided you and you’re wanting to use something other than Creative Cloud, there are no fonts there.

Glenn Kowalski:
That’s right, that’s right. You can get them from other sources too. You can get them from Linotype or Monotype or other places as well. So anyway, I’m just saying that cloud-based fonts are a thing and buying them from the cloud. And also Suitcase, Connect Fonts is managing them on the cloud. You can synchronize them from user to user on the cloud as way to manage them. I don’t know what other ways there are. It seems like the big font servers are going away. Font management servers they used to have are going away and font synchronizing on the cloud is taking over.

Marcus Ransom:
Managing font server was always something that I found, I won’t even say challenging, just an absolute nightmare in every organization I went to because trying to get the management server in line with the operating systems, they are running the versions of the Adobe software. They were running the versions of other software. They were running the administration overhead of the management server. So the idea that you can create, especially in studios, sets of fonts for different customers that you are working on. So you could have the right 400,000 fonts available for the work you were doing on a particular day and then have a different 400,000 fonts available tomorrow when you’re working on a different customer in theory sounds great.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I’ve known people that did that always with pain. And I do feel like that kind of brings us into the next question, which if Adobe’s trying to corner the market on font management these days to quote you, not that I know that to be perfectly honest. I just smile and nod for the most part. But I do feel like Extensis and their suitcase product was the big thing for, gosh, 20 plus years. So is that less of a thing or font connect, which I think is what that evolved into. Or would you say that because they’re mostly using Adobe products, they’re just using that?

Glenn Kowalski:
I think that it might be a little bit less of a thing, but Suitcase is still pretty widely used or Connect fonts or I keep saying suitcase, but they want us to say Connect fonts. Now I know they seem to be changing up the game. Extensis, they keep changing up the game every year. They keep changing their name and changing their procedures and they’re jumping through hoops to do something different all the time.

Charles Edge:
I think that’s common with organizations who are staring down the long cold barrel of disruption.

Glenn Kowalski:
I agree.

Charles Edge:
They’re trying to pivot and stay relevant. And I’m not saying they’re not relevant, but the world is changing around them, I guess. So that’s hard to accept for any product manager.

Marcus Ransom:
They’ve also got the really challenging role as well, where I always found in Design Studios, the users fall into two categories. They were the people who just wanted everything to be brand new, the latest version, there was a new workflow for managing fonts. It was a new workflow for managing something came out and they wanted that straight away. And then there were the… Especially in print houses and bureaus where they’re like, “We’ve got this working, we’re not changing anything. We’re running a four-year-old version of Adobe Creative Suite rather than cloud because this is working with all of our automation systems in place, we want everything converted back.” So for a company to then be able to support both kinds of users, the move fast break things and the, you’ll take my process from my cold dead hands is a hard job to deal with that.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah, yeah. Well, there’s the opposite side. Instead of using a million fonts, some really older designers in the industry have always said that you really only need a handful of good fonts to do the job, and you don’t really need all these hundred fonts. You really just need the, I don’t know what you call them, the industry standard best fonts and 10-12 fonts and that’s all you need.

Marcus Ransom:
But then you get the other side. I remember one of the designers I worked for, David Lancashire, claimed to be able to tell by looking at something set in Helvetica, for example, which particular type foundry they had used for the version of Helvetica, given that his eyesight was failing and he struggled to be able to read things at the time, we were like, “Yeah, I wonder how much of this is true.” But every time we’d try and catch him out on it, he knew. He could tell. He lived and breathed fonts. But yeah, exactly as you were saying, he had his repertoire of fonts that he would use and what he was able to get graphically and typographically out of a fairly small range of fonts was pretty amazing.

Charles Edge:
If you were to say that Max Miedinger or Edward Hoffman could tell the difference between Helvetica, I would totally agree because they invented it, but other than them, probably not.

Tom Bridge:
I don’t know. I got a whole lot of people who can properly spot Aerial-

Charles Edge:
Well, Aerial-

Tom Bridge:
And treat it as a cardinal sin.

Charles Edge:
Nevermind.

Marcus Ransom:
This was also someone who would get coffee table books. They were producing set in eight color process black. So it was printing eight different kinds of black to get the outcome that they want.

Charles Edge:
Well, anyone who bought a jacket and pants for a suit at different times from a different vendor knows that there are different type of blacks. But when it’s dark, I never go out when it’s light. So when it’s dark, nobody cares. Anyways, whatever.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, everybody’s got to have a hobby. For some people it’s fonts and they get really into fonts and keeps them off the streets.

Tom Bridge:
There you go. I’m out of trouble.

Charles Edge:
So Postscript doesn’t keep Adobe off the streets anymore because that patent expired a long time ago. So you mentioned that Adobe was dropping Postscript support, and I guess Extensis is also dropping Postscript type one font soon, I think. Don’t quote me on that.

Glenn Kowalski:
I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re dropping it, but I know that Adobe’s dropping it, which is big.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I thought that he announced it, but I don’t read all of the emails sometimes that different vendors send me. But I guess, what is that evolution beyond that postscript type one font that uses some of that original math from the Ivan Southern Days?

Glenn Kowalski:
Well now it’s either TrueType or OpenType, which are very similar to each other. OpenType is basically Microsoft and Adobe got together and had a baby.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, because Apple wanted to charge them for TrueType.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah, Apple did charge Microsoft for TrueType and Adobe and Microsoft. It just made an extended version of TrueType. So that’s what it all is now, basically one or the other. And it is, so that’s good. So you don’t have as much type reflowing and everything when you go back and forth, so that is helpful.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, finally getting to a good common standard there. It always felt like, what is it they say the line about the British and the Americans, they were divided by their common language. And that was how I always felt when you had to deal with fonts across platforms where there wasn’t a great standard until, I don’t know, gosh, 15, 20 years ago and finally getting to a state where we are now, where OpenType and TrueType are pretty much cross-platform by default is a pretty great thing.

Charles Edge:
Except then Erik van Blokland, if I said that right, Jonathan Kew and Tal Leming made web OpenFont one.

Tom Bridge:
God, no, no, no. We’re going to talk about CSS fonts now. No, I’m not. I did not bring my glasses.

Charles Edge:
We can totally skip that. Sorry. Okay. But yeah, TrueType, TrueType GX, I don’t know that it’s worth talking about any of that because when it comes to device management and managing what fonts can load on a device or how that experience is able, it feels like all the tools, whether it’s Extensus or Adobe or insert other vendor here, it feels like they all support whatever, that they use Native OS hooks to support whatever type of font needs to be loaded. I guess.

James Smith:
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Charles Edge:
So I found when it does come to these fonts, there are a few tricky little wickets. So fonts from the old font suitcase days have to be, I guess if you’re going to continue using them converted to TTF fonts or files by way of a tool like Dfonts. Is DfontSplitter still a thing? Or do the third party party tools just do this for you for free?

Glenn Kowalski:
Well, it looked down on to convert the fonts because it doesn’t do it very efficiently. It will add extra points on it. It’s not going to do the curves right. It’s not going to make it very efficient. So you might have problems printing or just issues.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, aliasing, stuff like that too, maybe.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah. Extensis actually has a lot of good information about how to survive the Postscript transition. And then they talk about it and they say, you really only want to do that in a emergency. An emergency, but really a crisis. You can’t find any font that matches your logo or something like that. But you wouldn’t want to do it on a lot of text, like a body of text because it’s going to be problematic more likely than not.

Charles Edge:
And in their defense, all these vendors who are dropping Postscript support, it was created in the early eighties, maybe ’82 if my memory serves. And that was still Xerox Park, Adobe transitioned out of Xerox Park, or at least a lot of the initial founders were at Xerox before. And so what was ’82? I can’t even do that math. It’s so vast a space. But 40 plus years later to still be supporting some of the same stuff, it’s like, “Wow, a lot of things have moved on since then,” so I can’t say I blame them.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah, there’s not much left that has been supported that long and still hanging out on the computer.

Charles Edge:
And you can still go grab those raw files off of a 1984, 1985 Mac and drag them into a modern Mac. And they mostly still work if you can find a way to get the file onto the Mac. Because you have to go from different file systems. But yeah, that’s fun times. And I guess one other thing we’ve been talking about Macs, and this is the Mac Admins Podcast after all, but is it different for Windows or do you work with Windows?

Glenn Kowalski:
I don’t really work that much with Windows. We have some Windows clients, but it’s some very small percentage and they’re not designers working in the windows, so they’re just use whatever fonts are on the computer. So we don’t have font issues there.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I literally don’t know. I have this raw assumption, although when you assume you make what out of you and me, but I do assume that if you’re using Extensis or Adobe or whatever, that if it’s cross-platform, that it has pretty much full support for whatever platform you happen to be using. And I know they cross license each other’s formats between TrueType and OpenType and stuff like that. But I don’t know. Tom or Marcus, have you dinked around with the window side?

Tom Bridge:
I’ve dinked around with it. There are some tools for it. I mean obviously the Adobe tools exist for this kind of stuff as well because Adobe exists across platforms. But it was going to say, most of my experiences with fonts on Windows are run screaming. And that’s just where I’ve gone.

Marcus Ransom:
And it’s an interesting consideration. I remember back when I was working at the university, there was the usual ebbs and flows where there was a push to move everything to virtualization because they had Adobe software running in their virtual desktop environment. We’re saying, “Well, the students can use this. And well, you’ve got the Adobe software working in those environments. But what you don’t have is we’re not just teaching the students how to use the software, but they actually need to learn how to manage fonts, manage printing, all of the workflows. And if they’re learning a platform that’s not going to reflect what they’re going to be using out in industry, then they’re going to struggle to get a job or they maybe won’t see out their trial period or anything like that. So no longer having to worry about managing fonts on Windows.
But I’ve always remembered it’s been a thing where no matter how you have it set up, there’s always going to be that one file or that one font where it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is not working on Windows for this version, or we have to have a completely different way of managing it or setting it up.” Which for me sort of led to me going, I want nothing to do with that. Then Mr. or Mrs. Windows person over there can deal with that mess and I’ll just stick to the max and the particular subset of messes that we have to deal with.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah, well there’s still troubleshooting to do. On the max side too, and those old fonts are still hanging out. And occasionally we see someone with an old Helvetica and you launch Safari and all of a sudden everything looks like question marks and try to figure out why. And it’s got some old fonts hanging out there, got to clean it up.

Charles Edge:
So I met a guy in Minneapolis who makes font, we’ll include a link in the show notes I guess, but Chank, which by the way has got to be one of the cooler jobs, although I don’t think it works the way it worked back when Susan Care was doing it, where you use basically a light bright to map them out. They could bit map font. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Graph paper. But have you worked with any custom created font for customers? And I guess do those pose a unique management scenario or they just files to be pushed out to groups of users?

Glenn Kowalski:
I haven’t worked with anyone that has requested a custom, but I think you might be talking about an actual font designer that markets fonts.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, both.

Glenn Kowalski:
And yeah, there’s a lot of font designers out there. I remember back in the day when a lot of font companies were pretty questionable and you could buy some fonts and they were really cheap fonts, you’d start using them and the quality of them was just terrible and it caused printing problems and all kinds of trouble. But I think that things have come a long way since then, and probably these fonts are much better. Good, good fonts is probably just a matter of tasted at this point.

Marcus Ransom:
So something I got to have a lot of fun working with was, same designer I mentioned before, David Lancashire, where he would hand draw fonts on tracing paper with a brush and fill it all in. And then that gets handed over to one of the graphic designers who would then scan those in and then try to create the vector forms around that and then try to work out in this phenomenal font construction software to be able to get all of the kerning and letter spacing and everything correct.

Glenn Kowalski:
Oh, yeah. That’s a lot of work.

Marcus Ransom:
And then having to go back to David, the designer and go, actually, there’s a couple of dip thongs we need you to work out. Or when you realize how many different characters there are and all of the calculations and algorithms that go through to that. And sitting there watching that take place and the amount of cigarettes and bottles of red wine that were required to get that to work in those days.
And as someone who had never really thought of fonts were things you installed, not things you actually drew was amazing. And then the discussions about translating that back to the cast font elements that we used in printing presses, which then turned into the discussion of, “Oh, well let’s go out into the storeroom and here’s all of these trays of letter press that we’ve got in here from when we used to do all of that.” And actually sort of joining those dots between someone with a chisel and a hammer, cutting these things out of stone through to printing and then through to what we do now with computers was amazing to see and realize how many of the rules that they were using, the geometry and the mathematics around it hadn’t changed at all.

Charles Edge:
Postscript type one, it’s still… I think there are two really interesting things about that type of conversation. One is aliasing and anti lacing, moving from that Susan Care era where it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got a grid of 16X16 and I’m laying these out by 32X32 or whatever. And then, “Oh, we’ve got all these blocky artifacts, so let’s alias those away.” And then the aliasing errors. So thus anti aliasing, like that kind of evolution.
But to me, the second part of that that’s so interesting is the similarity between fonts and so many other things, whether it’s encryption keys or because it’s all post Euclidean geometry. And so the geometry required to make vectorized graphics, especially when it comes to fonts versus the geometry required for encryption keys is just extremely similar. And then in an AI world, the winnowing or anti winnowing algorithms to try to detect that stuff as if we were doing anti aliasing is also really interesting. So I’m sorry, I’m nerding. I’m getting super nerdy and I see Tom laughing at me, so I’m going to shut up and say, Tom, you can take us to the bonus question.

Tom Bridge:
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Well, it wouldn’t be a pod, an episode of the Mac Events podcast if we didn’t have a good bonus question. And this one takes me to one of my all-time faves. Glen, what’s your favorite or the worst font you have ever seen?

Glenn Kowalski:
That’s a tough question. Favorite font. I like plain fonts. Nothing crazy. Hey, I love myself a good Helvetica.

Tom Bridge:
As a good gentleman does.

Glenn Kowalski:
Yes, Futura is good.

Tom Bridge:
Yes.

Glenn Kowalski:
I don’t know. I can’t pick anything else. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of them that I like a lot. I’m just going to go with Futura or Helvetica.

Tom Bridge:
I think that’s a solid choice. Marcus, you probably have an opinion here. I’m counting on you.

Marcus Ransom:
I’m very much in the Helvetica camp, but if I can’t choose Helvetica, Frutiger-Bold is always a nice one. I’m recalling setting out my folio of all my design work in Frutiger-Bold and sitting back mainly because one of the graphic designers I was working with said, “Hey, use this. It’s really good.” And then I said, “Wow, it is.” Who cares about my work that’s on there? The typography below it is bringing out my work. So that’s one for me. What about you, Charles?

Charles Edge:
Oh goodness. I think from just the nerd historical aspect, any black letter, like the original Gutenberg fonts, I have to dig just from historical, but since you’ve both been pro, I’m going to be anti for a second and say in the nineties when all this was new, bands like the Indigo Girls and REM experimented with fonts in their music videos and on their album covers, and some of those fonts were just fricking horrendous. So any font used by the Indigo Girls in the nineties, I’m going to put in the worst camp. I like the Indigo Girls. I’ve known a couple. Anyways, but yeah, any nineties band who used a font, it’s probably a horrible font, just throwing that out there. Yeah, even though I love respect a lot of nineties music because I’m old. How about you Tom?

Tom Bridge:
So I have a font that I’m allergic to, and it’s because of where I live.

Charles Edge:
Does it involve the Indigo Girls?

Tom Bridge:
It does not. It involves the District of Columbia government, and that is to say that Nostra, if it is a beautiful art deco-y font, oh, I love Art Deco has been just abysmally placed throughout anything that involves the current mayor’s administration. She’s on her third term. So this font has been literally everywhere, and there is no consistent style guide for its use by the city. And so it’s constantly showing up places. And because there’s no style guide, you’ll see it placed almost immediately right in front of a near other serif fonts. And it makes my eyes bleed.
And it has now gotten to the point because there’s no good style guide for its usage within the consistent brand that is the district government. Mayor Muriel Bowser presents a really terrible style guide. And so it’s one of those things that just drives me absolutely insane. And I know a bunch of other really solid graphic designers who feel very much the same way. So I at least can take some solace that I am not alone in my allergy to Nostra at this point. It was also the font used by metroblogging.com back in the day, and we ran the DC site here, and it was part of the thing that we rebelled against was when they redesigned the site over top of us without any consultation. And that’s how We Love DC got started.
But I think there are a bunch of really, really stellar fonts. One of the fonts that I just love seeing places now is Trajan. And if you’re not sure what font I’m talking about, you are familiar with it because it’s in every episode of Law and Order. It’s the Block Capitals font that they use for the Law title sequences, for all of the subcards and all of those things. It’s a really beautiful font when it’s used appropriately and sparingly which is not nearly often enough.

Charles Edge:
And I feel like I see it in a lot of art deco stuff. So to continue on with your art deco motif there.

Glenn Kowalski:
I’ll have to check that out.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I don’t feel like I see any good fonts ever for Art-nouveau, by the way, random side note, it is worth saying before the IBM Selectric came out in, I want to say 1961, almost all documents just had one font, and the Selectric was a typewriter that had a replaceable ball. So mid-document you could swap balls and continue printing or typing and then photocopy because that became a thing right around the same time. But that’s my nerd moment. A history nerd moment,

Marcus Ransom:
Also important. The being able to manage the spacing of letters is also something that in this day and age, this is even more important, where we’re not used to seeing things monospaced or letters class. So the great quote, Frederic Goudy, who said, anyone who would letterspace lowercase lowercase would steal sheep. So fonts aren’t bad. It’s the people using the fonts or who are doing the dreadful things and committing font crimes.

Charles Edge:
Font crimes can literally get you fine. Millions of dollars. I was involved in one of those, luckily not on having to pay millions of dollars, but millions of dollars per day until the font issue was addressed once. That was-

Tom Bridge:
That wAS pretty bad.

Charles Edge:
…a FDA fine, because on pill bottles, that can be a…

Tom Bridge:
You got to use exactly what’s in the spec.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. When the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company gets called out to the FDA to say, sorry, that gets someone from Apple on an airplane, basically.

Glenn Kowalski:
Got to make sure it’s legible. It’s got to be legible.

Charles Edge:
Right there. There’s definitely an equity thing in fonts. I mean, to your point about the DC government, there is definitely an approachability to government documents issue. State and local governments are required to make their information free, freedom of information, yada, yada, yada. But that doesn’t mean that they always have to do so in a way that’s legible. I’ve seen that a couple times where you’re like, “Wow, this is…”

Glenn Kowalski:
Yeah, but yet the fonts they use, they say that it’s got to be legible, so let’s use these fonts. But then the way they lay it out, you can’t read it.

Charles Edge:
To Marcus’s point about kerning. Yeah. Yeah. Marcus, you spent a whole weekend working on kerning for one of our t-shirts once.

Marcus Ransom:
I don’t know, you go through several waves of, “I’ve got this just about right. I hate this. I’m starting again. This is awful.” And you know, learn about a lot about yourself when you’re kerning.

Charles Edge:
That’s the quote of the episode. I do feel like I know bad kerning when I see it, but I don’t exactly know anything beyond that.

Marcus Ransom:
I remember one of the lecturers at design school was referring to kerning. I think James may need to beep this out to retain our rating, but the lesson on kerning was known as ant- …and the idea was that it’s a lot of effort for something that really isn’t going to be that much fun, apart from someone who’s really into ants. But for that person, it’s absolutely everything.

Charles Edge:
Or hinges because kerning comes from the Latin of hinge or Cardenas, kerning, nevermind.

Glenn Kowalski:
Kerning can count. If you have a big title and you have two letters that look too far apart, they can look really bad.

Tom Bridge:
And that always gets us into the cheming, which is the what happens when the letters get too close together. Glenn, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It’s been a great pleasure to talk with you. If folks want to find you on the internet, where should they go looking?

Glenn Kowalski:
Maclaboratory.com.

Tom Bridge:
It’s always great to see you. We’ve got so many great folks here in the DC area, and so I just want to say one, thanks. It’s great to see you, especially here in DC. We’ve got this wealth of great folks, and the folks at MacLab are a big part of that.

Glenn Kowalski:
Oh. Thanks a lot.

Tom Bridge:
Thanks to you and you and your team.

Glenn Kowalski:
Well, thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on.

Tom Bridge:
And of course, thanks so much to our wonderful sponsors this week. That is Kandji, Collide and Alectrona. And of course, thanks to all of the wonderful people who back us on Patreon. And thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Charles Edge:
See you next time.

Marcus Ransom:
See ya later.

Glenn Kowalski:
Thank you.

Speaker 6:
The Mac Admins podcast is a production of Mac Admins Podcast LLC. Our producer is Tom Bridge. Our sound editor and mixing engineer is James Smith. Our theme music was produced by Adam Codega the first time he opened Garage Band. Sponsorship for the Mac Admins podcast is provided by the Mac admins.org Slack, where you can join thousands of Mac admins in a free Slack instance. Visit macadmins.org and also by Technolutionary LLC. Technically we can help. For more information about this podcast and other broadcasts like it, please visit podcast.macadmins.org. Since we’ve converted this podcast to APFS, the funny metadata joke is at the end.