Christopher Slye

@pixelambacht Two and a half years ago, @stewf and I were at Adobe in San Jose looking through a room filled with boxes of, as you say, reports and books and correspondence from the Type team. There is plenty of uninteresting paperwork in the mix, so it’s a lot of work to dig through and find the hidden gems. I’m hoping, though, that the good stuff gets preserved and maybe digitized someday.

This looks like the formal end of an era – the muted conclusion of a decades-long program, Adobe Originals, that has been ebbing away. Not exactly surprising given Adobe’s, er, current product focus, but a melancholic moment. I hope Robert gets the send-off he deserves for his 38 years of service.

@klim Part of the problem was that some image rights in the original books didn't cover digital publication, IIRC. (Yes, some of those books had third party images in them.)

@frankrolf @justvanrossum Ah, well, that looks like a more recent use of the terminology. My point isn’t so much that it’s wrong or confusing to use “production name” when referring to final names, but that it’s also not wrong or confusing to use the names I’m talking about. The fact that recent tools have different conventions doesn’t change the fact that “production” (or “friendly”) ➝ “final” was (IMO) conventional and sensible for quite a while, and still familiar to many people. The RoboFont docs have always made perfect sense to me! 🙂

@justvanrossum For what it’s worth – and speaking as someone who spent a lot of time creating and working with the Adobe “GlyphOrderAndAliasDB” – I’ve always used “final names” for those that end up in the compiled font. I probably used “production names” for the development phase, but we also called them “friendly” names.

@wtrmt I can ask him. Possibly not. Robert mostly keeps to himself so I wouldn’t ever expect him to have the usual “contact me” kind of thing. At the very least, I could forward an email to him.

@wtrmt Excellent! Note, though, that Poetica was not Robert’s first typeface for Adobe. That would be (both) Utopia and Adobe Garamond in 1989.

@jasonsantamaria@typo.social Check you out, makin’ fonts! Very nice, Jason.

@Luke At some point (around the transition away from DVDs) I downloaded my Netflix rental history. Wild, wild stuff.

@Luke I'll have to go look now, but IIRC my first DVD rental was "Network".

@frankrolf Sexy.

@vhbelvadi Minion is probably my favorite as well. It’s a near perfect typeface IMO.

@tphinney Okay thanks. Interesting. Maybe the first ATypI in my experience without any evening events! (I haven’t been since 2019, though.)

@justvanrossum @frankrolf How does it agree? (Sincere question.) I see references to the GOADB and “final” names and “friendly” names there.

@nicksherman @frankrolf @justvanrossum Indeed! And apologies for missing the previous discussion that I inadvertently duplicated. That helps put the discussion in perspective.