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Type Manager Software for Display and Printing Adobe
Type Manager Software for Display and Printing
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The Adobe Type Manager (ATM ) software module converts outline format characters into a bitmap representation (a process called rasterization) for screen display or for printing to non-PostScript language output devices. It is currently available for the Macintosh ® , OS/2 ® , and Windows ^TM 3.0 environments.
ATM software intercepts the standard text system calls made by an application, rasterizes the required characters from the outline font, and displays the resulting bitmap on the screen. This produces much more accurate bitmap characters than can be achieved by scaling a bitmapped screen font to the required size. Figure 1 shows the difference between a character generated by the ATM software and a scaled bitmap screen font character. The advantage of generating screen fonts from the outline font used for printing is that the user gets WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) capability. The term WYSIWYG describes applications that attempt to represent on the screen exactly what will be printed, so that line lengths, the number of lines on a page, and the position of text and graphics will print exactly as expected. This aids productivity because changes are more quickly reflected on the display than by printing. Users can then visualize changes and make decisions, thus shortening the development cycle.
Figure 1 ATM software generated characters for a 72 dot-per-inch screen versus characters scaled from a bitmap screen font
ATM software also offers software developers and users the ability to send output to less expensive, non-PostScript printers such as low-cost dot matrix printers, as well as to medium resolution devices such as the Hewlett- Packard ® DeskJet ® or the Apple ® StyleWriter ® . This gives even low-budget users the ability to use the wide variety of available Type 1 font programs and, in many cases, to achieve higher quality output than was previously possible with those printers. One of the most significant benefits to users is that they can invest in type- faces for their current printer, and those fonts will work on a wide variety of output devices.
The ATM software also offers developers an important resource by supporting an application program interface (API). Applications can call the ATM software to get standard or transformed (scaled, rotated, or skewed) character bitmaps or to get character outlines for further transformations or other special applications. Also, the ATM software can be called to draw and fill Bézier curves for screen display.