Notes on Apple 4 fonts
Charles Bigelow, Kris Holmes · Electronic Publishing - Origination, Dissemination and Design · 1991
The standard bitmap fonts on the Apple Macintosh series of computers have become so much a part of the System interface that it is hard to conceive of a Macintosh without them. Following the adoption of TrueType technology for Macintosh System 7 the idea was put forward of developing TrueType outline versions of the four fonts involved: Chicago, Geneva, New York, and Monaco1. This “Apple 4 Fonts project” was taken on by Bigelow & Holmes in 1988. The notes which follow have not been worked up into any kind of formal paper but we thought that readers of EP-odd might be interested in knowing of the alternatives that were considered and how we eventually tackled the project. These notes were originally circulated as electronic mail, a medium in which informality and grandiloquence frequently co-occur. The original style has been preserved as an example of contemporary Silicon Valley ‘font-speak’. Given that the Macintosh System 7 would have built-in TrueType outline font technology, the standard Macintosh screen bitmap fonts would become obsolescent. Apple was faced with several alternatives: