The day after the Apple-Microsoft coup was announced, Adobe's chairman, John Warnock, appeared at a seminar and in an emotional speech said that Adobe would open the specifications for its outline fonts.
If Adobe had compromised a year ago, the sources said, the power struggle could have been avoided and Adobe could have been the unified standard. Privately, computer industry executives said it was Adobe's intractable stance on licensing that drove the larger companies to seek an alternative. This is impossible to verify, since specifications for the proposed technology have not been released, let alone products. The font technology is the foundation, and it is of crucial importance to everybody who uses the next generation of word processing, spreadsheets, graphics or any other application, as well as to more upscale publishing.''Īpple and Microsoft executives said they chose to use one another's technology because it was technically superior to Adobe's.
''We are on the brink of a new generation of computing with a rich graphics environment for all users. ''This is not just arcane stuff for the cognoscenti,'' Mr. His conference brings together the leading figures in the multimillion-dollar industry of desktop and electronic publishing. Seybold, publisher of the Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing. In the former, characters are stored as mathematical formulas that describe such characteristics as style, size, shape and weight outline fonts allow computer users to store one set of specifications in each type face and manipulate the size and other characteristics in almost infinite permutations.Įven though the technology may seem arcane to most computer users, or perhaps limited in significance to the specialized area of desktop publishing, the Microsoft-Apple agreement is ''probably the most important development in the computer industry this year,'' said Jonathan W. The Font Wars, as the competition among industry leaders is known, went ballistic last week at the Seybold Computer Publishing Conference here, and the outcome will fundamentally change the way software looks on computer screens and the way documents look when they are printed or sent to other computers.īill Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, and John Sculley, chairman of Apple Computer Inc., announced that their companies - opponents in court for the last year - had reached an agreement on sharing outline font technology and printer software.
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