What's NeXT? Archive

Adobe TouchType: Inside Look

Back when NeXT was trying to sell into the consumer market, one of their big partners was Adobe Systems, developers of the PostScript page description language that most of us rely on to print our pages with sharp, high-quality text and graphics, along with various graphics-oriented applications (Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Framemaker, to name a few). To help sell the NeXT platform, they developed several applications with features that were unique to the NeXT version, or that weren't available for any other platform. One of these was Adobe TouchType, a program for visually manipulating display type; that is, type that is 24 points or larger.

TouchType was written by software veteran Glenn Reid, who not only has worked for Adobe, but also NeXT and most recently Fractal Design; he now does contract programming and consulting for a variety of clients, including Adobe.

What made TouchType so unique, both then and now, is that it allowed creative types to work in a way that more closely resembled what they did before computers: cut and paste, rearrange, cut and paste some more, rearrange, etc. Programs like Illustrator, FreeHand, QuarkXPress and Pagemaker, just didn't offer that freedom. You were forced to unlock paths, type separate characters on separate lines or even in separate boxes; it wasn't very intuitive and it made for a lot of unnecessary work. TouchType lets you type your characters all at once, then move them up, down, sideways, apply color, even rotate them, anywhere you like.

When you start TouchType, the program opens a new document window and the Kerning Tools window above it. To the side are the program menu and the Tools panel, which contains the tools you need to enter, edit, select, color, move text and adjust the leading. The arrows on the Tools panel have the same action as the arrow keys on your keyboard, so you aren't forced to use the mouse. You can also toggle between the arrow tool and the text tool by a keyboard shortcut. The color well shows the color of the current selection; by clicking on the border of the color well you can bring up the NeXT Colors panel automatically.

Unlike other graphics programs, TouchType regards each character as an individual on a line, so your type is always linked in the order you entered it, even if you move your characters far apart from each other. Of course, if you do that, the manual recommends that you enter characters as separate lines to avoid having the spacing of your other type change. When you select type, it turns gray instead of being reversed out of black; a single mouse click selects the character, a double-click selects the word, and a triple-click selects the line. You can also drag over characters or lines with the arrow tool to select them.

Before you can really use TouchType effectively, you have to choose a font or fonts. If you only have a few, this is pretty simple. But most designers have many more than that (I have over 400), so it can be a bit more complicated. Luckily, the program has a nice feature called Visual Font Selection, which will give you a sample of all your fonts, or let you filter which ones you sample by their style and weight. When you see the one you think you want to use, you can identify it just by clicking on it, and its name will appear in the window. If you prefer, you can also use the standard NeXT Fonts panel.

Perhaps the best features of TouchType are its kerning tools, which let you adjust the spacing between individual characters or entire words. There are four ways to kern in TouchType: using the Touch button on the Kerning Tools panel; dragging the slider in the Kerning Tools panel; using the arrow keys to move characters; and using other menu commands. Touch kerning is very helpful, since it uses an algorithm to determine the optimal spacing for the chosen font, and I usually don't have to do any further adjustments. The program also lets you save and reuse kerning pairs, either temporarily or permanently. Leading (the vertical spacing between lines of type) is similar to kerning, where you use the Leading slider in the Tools panel, the arrow keys to move it up or down, or just drag it around with the arrow tool until it looks right. You can vertically constrain movement by holding down the Control key as you drag.

By default, TouchType saves files with a .type extension, which is really an EPS file with a different extension. But you can use TouchType documents with other programs that interpret EPS files, including Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand to add graphics or other embellishments. If you do, you can't take them back into TouchType without losing the page size and orientation information.

Other useful features include the ability to rotate type, arbitrarily in 1 degree increments or incrementally in 1 or 15 degree increments, clockwise or counter-clockwise, and copy the selection at the same time. You can also change the case of an entire text block or selected characters from upper- or lowercase to the other, so you won't need to retype your text. In fact, TouchType is packed with so many nice features that it's not possible to go through them all here. It has to be seen and used to be appreciated.

Although TouchType is mostly compatible with Rhapsody, we may never see it. Adobe has lost the source code and says there are no archive copies to be found anywhere. But it is possible that Glenn Reid will decide to rewrite the program for Rhapsody, perhaps with a different name, if there is enough interest or committed buyers. If you have a copy of TouchType, count yourself lucky; if you don't and you want to get your hands on it, try posting to comp.sys.next.marketplace or email Glenn Reid (glenn@rightbrain.com) to let him know you're interested in having it made available for Rhapsody.