Ascender - by Monotype Imaging

Webcast by Steve Matteson: Branding Through Custom Typography

2011-08-15T17:50:00.000-05:00

Please join us Tuesday, Aug. 16, at 4:00 p.m. eastern time for a presentation from renowned type designer Steve Matteson. Steve serves as our creative type director and may be best known for typefaces he has designed for Microsoft and Google.

Typefaces are a critical tool for creating a brand voice. Used properly, type will maintain a positive connection between a product and a user – particularly in an interactive setting. Steve will discuss why type is important, the type design process and challenges faced in creating typefaces for electronic media.

Steve had the honor to give this presentation at the recent InHouse Managers Conference in Chicago, and has been asked by HOW to deliver an encore.

The presentation will begin at 4:00 p.m. (EDT) on Tuesday, Aug. 16. Register at HOW DesignCasts.

What's old is new again

2011-07-11T16:33:00.000-05:00

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Target retail store chain has teamed up with the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum for its new "Vintage Varsity" collection of back-to-school clothing.

This is great news for fans of wood type - and for the Twin Rivers, Wisconsin based museum. It is a wonderful institution dedicated to the preservation of wood type. At TypeCon in New Orleans this past weekend we saw an inspiring video from the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum on their efforts to capture the stories and knowledge from the craftspeople who worked their for years, and to save this information for future generations.

Comic Sans Pro Typeface Family Makes its Debut

2011-04-01T03:08:00.000-05:00

Comic Sans Pro Adds OpenType Features to Extend Versatility of Comic Sans and Inspire
New Creativity and Expression

WOBURN, Mass., April 1, 2011 – The Comic Sans® typeface, one of Microsoft’s most popular esigns, has received a makeover courtesy of Monotype Imaging. Today the company has introduced the four-font Comic Sans Pro family of typefaces.

Featuring elements such as speech bubbles and cartoon dingbats, Comic Sans Pro extends the versatility of the original Comic Sans, designed by Vincent Connare for Microsoft in 1994. “Hats off to Monotype Imaging for enlivening Comic Sans and getting it back to its roots as a comic book lettering face. Now everyone can write with more panache – and look even more like a pro using swashes, small caps and other typographic embellishments,” said Connare.

“Every day, millions of people rely on Comic Sans for countless applications ranging from scrapbooking to school projects,” said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging. “Comic Sans is also a favorite in professional environments, used in medical information, instructions, ambulance signage, college exams, corporate mission statements and executive reprimands – even public letters from sports team owners to their fans. Breaking up with your spouse? Why not write a letter in Comic Sans Pro, embellished with a typographic whack!, pow! or bam! Comic Sans is everywhere, and now it’s even better.”

The Comic Sans Pro family includes regular and bold fonts, in addition to two new italic and bold italic fonts drawn by Monotype Imaging’s Terrance Weinzierl. “Our aim is to put the ‘fun’ back in ‘functional.’ We can’t wait to see Comic Sans Pro used in everything from second wedding announcements to warning labels,” said Weinzierl. “Long live Comic Sans!”

Comic Sans Pro contains a versatile range of typographic features including swashes, small caps, ornaments, old style figures and stylistic alternates – all supported by the OpenType® font format. OpenType-savvy applications, such as Adobe® Creative Suite®, QuarkXPress™ or Mellel™ software are required to access these features. Comic Sans Pro can also be used in new versions of Microsoft® Office including Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Publisher 2010. In addition, Comic Sans Pro includes a set of ornaments and symbols, including speech bubbles, onomatopoeia and dingbats, pre-sized to work well as bullets.

Availability
Based on the OpenType cross-platform format, Comic Sans Pro is available as individual fonts or as a complete four-font family pack. Each font contains more than 1,000 characters. In addition to the OpenType features, the fonts include the WGL Pan-European character set, which supports western and eastern European, Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish and Baltic languages. Comic Sans Pro fonts can be viewed, purchased and downloaded from www.fonts.com, www.linotype.com, www.ascenderfonts.com and www.itcfonts.com.

Customers may contact Monotype Imaging in the U.S. toll-free at 800-424-8973, or in Europe at (+44 0)1737 765959, or 001781 970-6020, option 2. Linotype may be reached at +49 (0) 6172 484-418. Customers from other parts of the world may dial 001 781 970-6020 (U.S.).

About Monotype Imaging
Monotype Imaging combines technology with design to help the world communicate. Based in Woburn, Mass. with offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia, Monotype Imaging brings text imaging and graphical user interface capabilities to consumer electronics devices such as laser printers, copiers, mobile phones, navigation devices, digital cameras, e-book readers, digital televisions, set-top boxes and consumer appliances. The company also provides printer drivers and color imaging solutions to printer manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Monotype Imaging technologies are combined with access to more than 14,000 typefaces from the Monotype®, Linotype® and ITC® typeface libraries – home to some of the world’s most widely used designs, including the Times New Roman®, Helvetica® and ITC Franklin Gothic™ typefaces. Fonts are licensed to creative, business and Web professionals through e-commerce portals, direct and indirect sales and custom design services. Monotype Imaging offers industry-standard font solutions that support all of the world’s major languages. Information about Monotype Imaging can be found at www.monotypeimaging.com.

Monotype Imaging Introduces the Camphor Typeface Family

2011-02-21T13:40:00.001-06:00

WOBURN, Mass., Feb. 21, 2011 – Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: TYPE), a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has added the 12-font Camphor™ typeface family to the company’s Monotype® collection. The new additions are now available from Monotype Imaging’s Fonts.com, Linotype.com and ITCFonts.com stores. In addition, Camphor Web fonts are available from Fonts.com Web Fonts for website design.

“Camphor is a sturdy, hard-working yet elegant design,” said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging. “It’s space economical and suitable for a wide range of applications, from branding and advertising to signage and content. Camphor is a perfect addition to our Monotype collection, home to ageless classics such as the Gill Sans® face, a design Nick Job researched when he created Camphor.”

“I wanted to draw a modern, uncluttered sans serif family with classical proportions that was unashamedly English but with fewer idiosyncrasies than its influential forerunners,” said Job.

In addition to Gill Sans, which was designed for Monotype by Eric Gill in the late 1920s, another typeface, created years earlier by Edward Johnston for the corporate identity of the London Underground, provided inspiration for the creation of Camphor. At the time Gill drew Gill Sans, he was also motivated by Johnston’s design, which Gill had worked on while he apprenticed with Johnston in the early 1900s. Camphor, however, is “considerably narrower than Johnston’s typeface and has less attitude than Gill Sans,” according to Job. During the research phase for Camphor, Job also studied European sans serif typefaces, particularly those designed by Adrian Frutiger.

The complete Camphor family features 12 typefaces. Each of the six weights, which range from thin to heavy, have a companion italic. The family is available as a suite of OpenType® Pro fonts, which allow for the automatic insertion of small caps, ligatures and alternate characters. Pro fonts also offer an extended character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.

Availability
Camphor fonts can be viewed, purchased and downloaded from www.fonts.com, www.linotype.com and www.itcfonts.com. Camphor is also available for website design to commercial subscribers of Fonts.com Web Fonts. Further information is also available from Monotype Imaging’s Camphor microsite.

Customers may contact Monotype Imaging in the U.S. toll-free at 800-424-8973, or in Europe at (+44 0)1737 765959, or 001781 970-6020, option 2. Linotype may be reached at +49 (0) 6172 484-418. Customers from other parts of the world may dial 001 781 970-6020 (U.S.).

About the Monotype typeface library
Established more than a century ago and influenced by British design, Monotype is a Monotype Imaging brand that represents classic, high-quality typefaces for brand managers, publishers and content creators. Many of the world’s most widely used typefaces are part of the Monotype library, including the Arial®, Times New Roman® and Bembo® families. Today, typefaces are continuously released into the Monotype collection from some of the world’s most talented type designers. In addition, the Monotype Studio design team has created typefaces for global brands such as Barclays, British Airways and Dyson.

About Monotype Imaging
Monotype Imaging combines technology with design to help the world communicate. Based in Woburn, Mass. with offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia, Monotype Imaging brings text imaging and graphical user interface capabilities to consumer electronics devices such as laser printers, copiers, mobile phones, navigation devices, digital cameras, e-book readers, digital televisions, set-top boxes and consumer appliances. The company also provides printer drivers and color imaging solutions to printer manufacturers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Monotype Imaging technologies are combined with access to more than 14,000 typefaces from the Monotype, Linotype® and ITC® typeface libraries – home to some of the world's most widely used designs, including the Times New Roman, Helvetica® and ITC Franklin Gothic™ typefaces. Fonts are licensed to creative, business and Web professionals through e-commerce portals, direct and indirect sales and custom design services. Monotype Imaging offers industry-standard font solutions that support all of the world's major languages. Information about Monotype Imaging can be found at www.monotypeimaging.com.

Monotype is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Camphor is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Gill Sans, Arial, Times New Roman and Bembo are trademarks of The Monotype Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions. ITC is a trademark of International Typeface Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. ITC Franklin Gothic is a trademark of International Typeface Corp. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Linotype is a trademark of Linotype GmbH registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Helvetica is a trademark of Linotype Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions in the name of Linotype Corp. or its licensee Linotype GmbH. OpenType is either a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corp. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2011 Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. All rights reserved.

# # #

Monotype Imaging Inc.
Vikki Quick, 781-970-6115
vikki.quick@monotypeimaging.com

Monotype Imaging Limited
Julie Strawson, +44 (0) 1737 781624
jl.strawson@monotypeimaging.co.uk

Linotype GmbH
Lorenz Schirmer, +49 (0) 6172 484-470
lschirmer@linotype.com

ePub 3 specification now supports web fonts

2011-02-16T22:43:00.001-06:00

Monotype Imaging is actively involved with the efforts to standardize WOFF (Web Open Font Format) for use with web browsers. We are happy to report that the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has adopted support for WOFF in the EPUB 3 specification.

EPUB has been widely adopted for ebooks and EPUB 3 provides an even more robust environment for digital publications. WOFF support will bring significantly richer typography to ebooks and epublications.

Monotype Imaging has an extensive range of fonts available to publishers for use with WOFF in digital publications, and can also provide font technology to developers of ereading software and hardware devices to render fonts on screen with optimal reading quality and legibility.

> More information on fonts for ereading.

New fonts from Hallmark available for licensing

2011-01-26T20:23:00.001-06:00

A fresh batch of new script and display fonts from the Hallmark™ Design Collection is now available from Monotype Imaging for license to software & hardware developers. This vibrant range of fonts has a wonderful palette of personalities and uses.

The Baa Book™ HMK font family is a clever set of fonts that comes in regular and bold weights. Baa Book HMK has a sprightly letterforms and its hand lettering style is great for projects that need a youthful appearance.

The Fultoon™ HMK font is an energetic, quirky script typeface from Hallmark. Fultoon has a fun handwritten style with the appearance of ink blobs. Its uneven strokes creates a sense of excitement and joyful energy.

The Sandy Text™ HMK typeface family is a fresh, graceful design from the talented lettering artists at Hallmark Cards. Sandy Text HMK is a casual script with an engaging, flowing handwriting style. It comes in both regular and bold weights for added flexibility and contrast.

The Twizot™ HMK font is an engaging, alternative roman font with a unique, organic lettering style. Twizot HMK has a has an uneven baseline that gives it plenty of energy and bouncy letterforms that make it a fun font to work with.

Happy Holidays from Monotype Imaging

2010-12-14T10:36:00.003-06:00

From the entire team at Monotype Imaging, we want to send you our sincere wishes for a joyous holiday season and a very happy 2011.

The above image is featured on this year's Ascender holiday card. It was letterpress printed with love & care by Judith Berliner and her team at Full Circle Press. The image of the initial letter T was drawn by Frederic W. Goudy. Goudy Forum Pro and Goudy Fleurons were designed by Fred Goudy and digitally revived by Steve Matteson and Tom Rickner. Typography by Steve Matteson.

Ascender Corp Aquired by Monotype Imaging

2010-12-08T06:58:00.000-06:00

On December 8, 2010, Monotype Imaging announced the acquisition of Ascender Corp. We’re excited to be part of the Monotype Imaging team, as they have the same passion for type design and solving challenging font problems as we do.

This acquisition represents a continued commitment to provide the finest quality font development and licensing to Ascender’s customers. By combining Ascender’s expertise in type design, font engineering and multilingual font development with Monotype Imaging’s team of experienced professionals and renowned typefaces, we’re able to offer an unparalleled suite of font products and services to meet our customers needs.

Starting today, our customers will now have access to a more robust and comprehensive offering of typeface designs including the thousands of typefaces available in the esteemed Monotype®, Linotype® and ITC® typeface collections. In addition we will be able to offer a broader range of font technology products, all supported by an industry leading team of font development professionals.

By enriching our offering of typefaces and deepening our design expertise, this union will allow us to strengthen our ability to combine technology with design to help the world communicate.

Read the full news release.

More Fonts for Developers!

2010-11-15T23:35:00.000-06:00

This past month Ascender has signed font distribution licenses with four distinctive type designers/foundries located across the globe. These wonderful fonts include superbly crafted text, display and script fonts that are available for developers to license with their products, and also for instant download by end-users.

Borges Lettering
Borges Lettering features the typefaces and lettering design of Charles Borges de Oliveira, a talented lettering artist and graphic designer with a delightful repertoire of handwriting script fonts.

Stereotypes
Stereotypes is a Germany-based type foundry showcasing a range of new fonts designed by Sascha Timplan. The expression “Stereotypes” is about the love of typography and music—it has nothing to do with cliché ideas!

Bean & Morris
Bean & Morris Fonts is a collaboration of two of the most prolific personalities in Australian lettering, logo design and typography: Russell Bean and Keith Morris. The Bean & Morris font collection features a creative range of typefaces including text, display and script fonts.

Type Associates
Type Associates is an Australian-based typographic services group formed in 1993. The Type Associates font collection features high quality typefaces created by Russell Bean and other talented type designers with an emphasis on practical, enduring type designs.

Letter.2 - Type Design Competition

2010-10-13T17:49:00.000-05:00

Ascender is proud to announce that it is a Gold Sponsor of Letter.2 - ATypI's second type design competition. It has been ten years since the first ATypI competition, and Letter.2 is a contest that seeks to identify excellence in type design from around the world.

Any typeface published from October 2001 through August 2011 are eligible. Submissions begin in April 2011, and the judging will occur in October 2011 in Buenos Aires. More information can be found at http://www.letter2.org/

Tom Rickner explains font rendering

2010-10-13T10:56:00.007-05:00

Ascender's Tom Rickner has been tuning fonts for the screen for more than 20 years, and is recognized as the leading authority on TrueType hinting. In this post Tom provides an overview of font rendering.

The way a font looks on screen is determined by the system’s rasterizer, an indispensable piece of software which produces the bitmaps we view on screen or in print.

Fonts can be stored as bitmaps, outlines or strokes. Each format has its pros and cons, which we will discuss in future issues, but all of them are ultimately rendered as a bitmap.

Figure 1. Bitmap of an “ampersand” and its underlying data.

A bitmap is essentially a series of discrete pixels arranged to produce the desired shape of a letter at a specific size and resolution. Bitmaps can be black and white, where a pixel is either “on” or “off”.

Bitmaps can also be grayscale or even color. The number of shades of gray or number of colors in a bitmap is referred to as the bit depth. In the case of stroke or outline fonts, the data can be interpreted by the rasterizer to produce bitmaps at an effectively infinite number of sizes, bit depths and orientations.

Figure 2. A scalable outline and some of its possible rasterizations.

Let us begin by examining in broad terms how a typical TrueType or OpenType font is converted into pixels.

Scalable Outline Format
The outline of each glyph is stored as a series of coordinates that, when connected by lines and curves, produce the shape of the letter in question. OpenType fonts can have their glyphs described with either cubic beziers (Postscript CFF) or quadratic beziers (TrueType) which use different mathematical descriptions of their curves. But the idea remains the same: a series of connected points define the idealized shape of each letter.

Figure 3. Scalable outline of an “S” with its defined point structure.

Outline Scaling
These coordinates are scaled to the desired size for rendering. Type size is typically expressed in printers’ points. While point size is useful for typographers and graphic designers, it does not communicate the resolution of the rendering device, and so a more precise unit of measurement is what we call pixels per em, or ppem. This resolution-independent value defines the number of device pixels within the point size of the font. One can envision the scaled outline as being drawn on tracing paper, laid over graph paper, where the squares produced by lines on the graph paper represent the pixels of the device. The height of the point size in pixels is the scaled ppem size.

Outline Adjusting
Once an outline is scaled to the desired target size, a bitmap could be created by simply filling in pixels which reside within the glyph outline. This process of filling pixels is called scan conversion. One of the simplest scan conversion algorithms is to turn a pixel “on” if its center resides within the confines of the glyph outline. This very simple method produces adequate results at large sizes, or with very high resolution, but it is inadequate for low resolution environments like a desktop or mobile screen.

Figure 4. TrueType font comparisons with various hinting methods. Note the problem characters.

These results can be improved by adjusting the outline to better fit the pixel grid using what is generically referred to as ‘hints’. Hints are defined as any code or data which, when interpreted by a font rasterizer, will improve the resulting bitmap. They typically ensure a level of consistency in height alignments and stem weights, as well as improve the overall shapes and spacing of a font. The hints can be generated either “on the fly” within certain rasterizers, or (in the vast majority of cases) they are developed as a part of the font production process. The latter can be done manually, automatically, or some combination of the two. This overview is too brief to cover such a deep topic thoroughly, but it may suffice to say that the more manual human intervention that is applied to the hinting of a font, the higher the quality of the final rendering.

Font Rasterizers in the Wild
There are many different rasterizers in use today, and each of them is unique in some way from all the others. As the inventors of TrueType, Apple delivered the first TrueType rasterizer with Macintosh System 7 in 1991. In an effort to make TrueType the standard font format, they licensed TrueType to Microsoft and other font foundries. However, even the first port of Apple’s code to Windows 3.1 resulted in small differences. The differences have only increased with time, and so it is a significant challenge to produce a font which renders the same pixels in multiple environments. Matters are complicated further now that OpenType is the defacto standard, as OpenType can support either TrueType or PostScript style outline data, and thus each rasterizer has two main code bases to support these different sub-formats.

Figure 5 - comparison of a font rendered in popular font rasterizers

In addition to these, there are a variety of proprietary implementations, which have their own idiosyncrasies. In our next issue we will look at each of the major rasterizers in greater detail and explore how different types of OpenType data interact with them.

More Information:
On-Screen Legibility (hinting)
Fonts for User Interfaces

Ascender brings distinguished Hallmark™ fonts to market

2010-09-30T01:00:00.007-05:00

We are proud to announce that fonts from the Hallmark Design Collection are now available from Ascender!

For more than four decades, Hallmark Cards has created typefaces influenced by art, fashion and popular culture. These fonts were developed by Hallmark specifically for proprietary use in greeting cards, framed sentiments and other forms of social expression.

Ascender worked with the Hallmark lettering and font development team to develop high quality TrueType and OpenType versions with a full complement of glyphs that today’s creative professionals and software developers require. The fonts in the Hallmark Design Collection feature an impressive lineup of both formal and informal script and handwriting styles, including many with multiple weights.

Starting today, these distinguished fonts are available from Ascender on its various websites:

AscenderFonts.com - instant downloads for creatives to install on their personal computers.

FontsLive.com - web fonts for use with CSS @font-face by web designers & developers.

AscenderCorp.com - licensing to software developers & hardware manufacturers to include fonts with their products.

Matthew Carter named as a 2010 MacArthur Fellow !

2010-09-28T20:28:00.001-05:00

Matthew Carter, the designer of Georgia, Verdana, Nina and many other typefaces for print and the screen, was announced today as one of 23 MacArthur Fellows for 2010 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. There is a very nice article on the MacArthur website including a video interview.

Matthew is the second type designer to be named a MacArthur Fellow. The first was Chuck Bigelow, co-designer of the Lucida family of fonts, in August 1982.

MacArthur Fellows demonstrate exceptional creativity and promise, and it is quite an honor to be recognized by the Foundation. Congratulations Matthew!

Typographer was a drummer

2010-09-03T00:27:00.002-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfwOOW6bXjABelieve it or not, before Steve Matteson (Ascender's Type Director) started drawing typefaces for a living, he was a drummer in a band called The Bridge. Here is the font cowboy himself caught on some rare footage that was recently released ... View the "Departure Song" video

Study shows Verdana is great for reading on screen

2010-08-16T13:07:00.002-05:00

Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a problem that can impact people who spend a lot of time on computers. There are a variety of factors that can affect eyesight, including the brightness and contrast of the computer screen, lighting conditions and the fonts used.

Dr Jim Sheedy, head of Vision Ergonomics Research Laboratory and professor of optometry, Pacific University, on a recent trip to India told the Deccan Herald that a study funded by Microsoft found that Verdana at sizes from 10 to 12 is best for reading on screen without discomfort.

"If the text size is three times lesser than your threshold size, you would struggle to read the font. In turn, you would lean forward to read clearly, which would then affect your body due to uncomfortable posture," he told Deccan Herald.

Read the full story

Type Americana conference

2010-07-30T11:40:00.003-05:00

On November 12 & 13, 2010 in Seattle, Washington there is a gathering of historians, designers and wood blocks from the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, hosted by the School of Visual Concepts.

Ascender's type director, Steve Matteson, will be speaking about Fred and Bertha Goudy and their lives working together and their enormous impact on typography and printing.

For more information visit http://typeamericana.svcseattle.com//.

Stats on Windows XP and Windows 7

2010-07-13T12:07:00.001-05:00

Ascender is proud to offer licenses for Microsoft's fonts - to everyone from end users looking for a font that came with an old version of Publisher to developers and enterprises seeking Microsoft fonts for compatibility purposes, or for their on-screen quality or language support features.

At Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2010, Tami Reller, Corporate Vice President and CFO, Windows & Windows Live provided some interesting statistics about Windows and PCs:

There are 1.1 billion PC users worldwide
In the first seven months, 150 million licenses of Windows 7 were sold
370 million Windows PCs expected to be shipped in the next 12 months
40 million netbooks are expected to ship in the next 12 months
74% of businesses still run Microsoft Windows XP

View the full presentation.

Ascender proud to announce CanadaType fonts now available!

2010-07-13T01:42:00.001-05:00

Today we are happy to introduce yet another fine collection of fonts is available for licensing from Ascender. Canada Type boasts an impressive type library with distinctive script fonts and wonderful historical and nostalgic fonts. There are over 500 fonts in the Canada Type collection - all available now for purchase and instant download from AscenderFonts.com and also for software and hardware companies to license for use with their products from the AscenderCorp.com website.

FontsLive - Ascender's web font service - enhancements announced

2010-07-09T12:01:00.001-05:00

We are pleased to announce that Ascender has enhanced its web font service available on FontsLive.com to offer advanced features to its customers for controlling how web fonts are loaded into web pages.

Starting today, Ascender’s customers at FontsLive can use the WebFont Loader, a JavaScript library co-developed by Google and Typekit that provides a variety of options for web developers to control the web font loading experience. This allows developers to establish a more consistent occurrence across browsers and tap additional features related to the process of downloading and displaying fonts on a web page.

Ascender's FontsLive service offers hundreds of premium quality fonts from leading type designers and foundries for license as web fonts (and also as downloads for designers to use on their workstations). FontsLive makes it simple and fast for web designers and developers to implement web fonts by adding a single line of code to web pages.

The WebFont Loader JavaScript library is being made available as an optional feature for developers to access via their FontsLive account.

“The WebFont Loader provides more control over how web fonts are downloaded and displayed on web pages” said Tomas Kirda, Chief Technology Officer with DevBridge, Ascender’s web development partner. “The Ascender module for the WebFont Loader will be a welcome addition for our more advanced customers who are comfortable with JavaScript and want more powerful tools with their hosted or self-hosted web font accounts” he added.

Here is an example of the single line of code a FontsLive customer would add to their web pages to access their web fonts:

Instead of using the above CSS link, to access the Ascender module with the WebFont Loader JavaScript Library, the following sample code would be used:

As an alternative, FontsLive customers already using Google's AJAX APIs would call the WebFont Loader as follows:

The controls for accessing the WebFonts Loader are available to FontsLive customer in their account management area. The JavaScript code is dynamically generated based on the web fonts selected for a particular website project in a user's account.

FontsLive offers a free 30 day trial for customers to see how powerful web fonts are as a way to enhance the typography of web sites. Users can experiment with the standard FontsLive code, or accessing the WebFont Loader. For more information visit http://www.FontsLive.com

New font pack showcases OpenType features in Microsoft Office 2010

2010-07-06T14:30:00.001-05:00

Microsoft Office 2010 introduces a variety of OpenType advanced typographic features previously only available to creative professionals using Adobe Creative Suite or QuarkXPress. The features support includes ligatures, number forms & spacing, contextual alternatives and stylistic sets.

Today we are proud to announce the Ascender 2010 Font Pack - an affordable collection of OpenType fonts that showcases the new font features in Word 2010 and Publisher 2010.

The Ascender 2010 Font Pack contains the following fonts: Comic Sans 2010 (including new italic and bold italic fonts), Trebuchet 2010 (including new black & black italic fonts), Impact™ 2010, Pokerface™ 2010, Rebekah™ 2010 and Rebus Script™ 2010.

The Ascender 2010 Font Pack is priced at $14.99 with a single user license and is available for immediate download exclusively from Ascender's FontMarketplace.com website.

Comic Sans in the news once again

2010-06-22T10:38:00.000-05:00

Comic Sans is a typeface you either love or hate. Much has been written about Comic Sans, typically by folks who love to hate it. -:)

Every now and then someone stands up to defend this quirky cartoon-style handwriting font that millions of Windows and Microsoft Office users make use of (or avoid!).

Patrick Kingsley wrote a nice article in the Guardian titled "In Defence of Comic Sans" that we thought was worth sharing.

Award-winning TypeTogether fonts now available from Ascender

2010-06-09T09:43:00.003-05:00

Today we are happy to announce that Ascender is now offering for license the distinguished fonts from the TypeTogether collection. The award-winning TypeTogether fonts are available in TrueType and OpenType for purchase and instant download from www.AscenderFonts.com and also for licensing to software and hardware developers from www.AscenderCorp.com.

“What we like about Ascender is their reputation as an innovative font developer and distributor, and their expertise with licensing fonts to everyone from home users to major corporations,” said Veronika Burian, co-founder of TypeTogether.

View the news release here: http://www.ascendercorp.com/pr/2010-06-09/

Ascender launches FontsLive.com site with premium quality web fonts

2010-05-18T00:32:00.005-05:00

2010 is definitely the year of web fonts! So much is happening and Ascender is proud to be leading the way! Today we are announcing a new site for web designers and developers focused on web fonts. FontsLive.com has some of the most advanced web font solutions available, and features a hand-picked selection of fonts that are optimized for readability on screen.

FontsLive leverages the Ascender Web Fonts platform to offer designers the option of cloud-based hosting or self-hosted solutions. All fonts on FontsLive.com are reviewed for their on-screen quality. Ascender's TrueType hinting team, led by Tom Rickner, evaluates the quality of each font and optimizes the rendering in various display environments.

The FontsLive.com website offers a free 30 day trial for designers to try out fonts and see the quality for themselves. For more information, read the Ascender news release, or visit www.FontsLive.com.

TrueType hinting - the key to Ascender's superior quality fonts

2010-05-16T11:57:00.001-05:00

Ascender is the undisputed leader in producing the finest quality fonts that render well on screen. Whether for User Interfaces or web fonts, the challenges remain the same to optimize the user experience with fonts that are legible and readable.

Ascender's font experts have earned their reputation because of their expertise in 'hinting' TrueType fonts. Led by Tom Rickner, the Ascender team has developed a wide range of fonts that can be found in mobile phones, digital TVs and set top boxes, operating systems and devices of all kinds.

Ascender uses many of the same tools as other foundries to produce the basic font outlines. But that's where the similarity ends. Ascender's unique expertise and proprietary tools allow it to generating high quality TrueType fonts that are superior to basic autohinted fonts.

This process allows the Ascender team to hand edit the code and generate superior hints, and thus optimize the output for various rendering engines. All of this allows Ascender to produce TrueType fonts unsurpassed in font quality.

A tribute to Harold Berliner, printer, district attorney and good friend.

2010-04-26T22:32:00.000-05:00

Harold Berliner passed away this last weekend at the age of 86. Harold was a good friend of the Ascender team - we first got to know Harold almost 20 years ago when he had a wonderful letterpress printing and typecasting operation that produced many fine books and broadside posters.

We hope to put together a collection of our thoughts and stories in the coming days.... in the meantime our thoughts and prayers to out to Harold's family.