Boston InDesign User Group Home Meeting Summary Archive

Meeting Notes Archive

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

The Boston InDesign® user group got off to a great start at the Massachusetts College of Art, the only public independent art college in the country and a member of Adobe’s Partners By Design program. In addition to free food, free parking, and extremely generous software giveaways, compelling presentations were given by Adobe’s Thomas Phinney and Noha Edell, as well as by group members themselves.

Massachusettes College of Art http://www.massart.edu/indexF2.html

Noha Edell kicked off the meeting by explaining the benefits that Adobe provides to user group members — many of which are accessible on this very site (see the menus on the left).  She explained that InDesign user groups are springing up all across the country as InDesign gains momentum.

She also bestowed the first of many valuable prizes, an InDesign Success Kit worth over $350, on all attendees.

The featured speaker was Adobe's Thomas Phinney, whose entertaining and informative explanation of the inner workings of OpenType® gave us a better understanding of how to use InDesign’s advanced typographic features.

Thomas started his presentation with Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black, an amusing little typographic film from Cheshire Dave.

Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black http://www.cheshiredave.com/ mastication/2002/07/0037-btt.html

He then went into an overview of OpenType. It was an evening of glyphs, swashes, ligatures, old-style figures, true small caps, and other features.

Adobe InDesign and Advanced Typography, Unicode, OpenType, and Top Issues Download a copy of Thomas Phinney’s presentation. Download PDF file 348 Kb download

He compared typography to film, in that although the viewer may not understand the techniques behind a movie or a well-designed typeface, he or she just knows that it works. The average user isn't conscious of the type in a good design; he or she knows only that it does what it should in conveying the message.

He then went into what happened in the past: “There were all sorts of hacks to set pretty typography (with expert sets and supplemental fonts) in older formats.” Today, Adobe’s core applications all support Unicode, and most support the advanced layout features of OpenType. But OpenType fonts “just work” in virtually all applications, and the same font can be used in both Mac and Windows.

One thing about all the fancy features: The underlying characters are always preserved, so the spell-checker doesn't trip over things like the Th ligature.

Thomas, who presented a seminar to several type foundries earlier in the day, also gave us a sneak peek at a stunning new OpenType font family, Bickham Script Pro, that simulates a 17th-century formal script, with elegant contextual ligatures.

Thomas wrapped up his presentation with a valuable Q&A that answered several subtle questions from the audience.