New Adobe Opentype Releases

Why do you suppose the Utopia opticals have been released as a series of Std OT fonts instead of a Pro font? Could this be some kind of tacit acknowledgement that not everybody in publishing has raced to embrace InD and thus have no access to the opticals in the Pro fonts?

I’m curious.

— K.

"Pro" in Adobe-speak means, among other things, Central European character set support, which Utopia Std doesn't have. There are other new OT releases from this last "wave" such as Fairfield and Dante which do contain nifty features like small caps, old style figures, and swashes, but retain the "Std" designation simply because they don't have CE support [yet?].

Forgive me for asking, but what are "opticals?" How do they differ from standard fonts?

I love Utopia. A brilliant combination of square sans and transitional serifs, but shaped not as seriously as Melior.

Opticals are size-specific outlines. As optical size increases, the designer can make thin strokes thinner, contrast higher, and serifs finer. Compare the "caption" (small size) to the "display" versions of Utopia, Minion or Warnock. When you think opticals, think point size.

Some non-Adobe examples would include Hoefler's HTF Didot and ITC Founder's Caslon.

And don’t forget the ITC Bodoni series — Six, Twelve, and Seventy-two.

You right. ITC Bodoni is so beautiful and well done, I like very much the 6pt design. This Sumner Stone design remind me his Cycles family with various specific size designs.

You can add to your list Miller and some others custom fonts from Matthew Carter, no?

To comeback to Utopia, its interesting to see that more its Display more it look close to his Kepler.

please explain to a layperson the choice between an optical and non-optical version of adobe jenson? i will use primarily for documents, book, etc. i do not quite understand the distinctions made in previous comments. thank you.

I was fond of some of the Multiple Master Type 1 fonts which featured an Optical axis. Minion and Kepler are two I recall which supported it. Too bad you can't get MM fonts to work under WinXP without some workarounds (like trying to run ATM 4.1).

Opticals can yield a big advantage in electrical sign manufacturing. On occaision, we'll get clients who specify serifed type for neon filled channel letters. Many text faces will have stems far too thin to accomodate neon tubing and housings. The client is faced with either scaling the lettering up to a size where the internal hardware will be accomodated or changing to a more channel letter friendly sans-serif monostroke font. Opticals can be a good compromise.

Many of Adobe's OpenType fonts come with a nice readme PDF, which has a good explanation of the "opticals" for those fonts that have them. For example, Adobe Jenson Pro has one (so does Utopia Std, but the link seems to be missing from the page; I'll get that fixed).

http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_1715.jhtml
Look on the right hand side of the page under "Related Documents"

Regards,

T

Thomas Phinney
Fonts Program Mgr.
Adobe Systems

Yes, "opticals" is a good coined word, because it actually means something, i.e. that the reader has to look at the fixed size of printed type to see the effect.

However, Adobe has watered down its meaning by also coming up with the term "optical kerning" (or is it "optical spacing"?) which doesn't make such good sense - if this continues, we can just say that everything is "optically designed" to look as good as possible.

I used the terms "Fine" and "Strong" for Walburn to distinguish nominal Display and Text styles, on the basis that people may not want to make the choice on traditional Text or Display criteria. As in the contrarian vogue for using the Bells/Griffith large.

My "opticals": Walburn, Goodchild, Worldwide (all originally newspaper fonts), Fontesque (yeah, really, milk that cow) and Artefact.

Yeah, lot of opticals out there. Optical sizing. Optical scaling. Optical ranging. Optical ranking. Probably a few more. But they all do have a separate nuance of meaning.