New magazine tools with Mac's System 7

Cupertino, Calif.-The next major Mac operating system will include powerful magazine production tools and the ability to output to a wider variety of devices.

Due for release during the first quarter 1990, Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh System 7.0 completely shuns Adobe Systems Inc.'s Display PostScript graphics manipulation system in favor of a wide-open format being developed by Apple-although it will continue to support the widely used PostScript language for output devices.

Among System 7's features:

*An automatic kerning system, called Layout Manager, that will give better management of keming, ligatures and foreign language characters.

* Tools that will speed links between Macintoshes and other manufacturers' printers, giving users many more output choices. These connections, called "drivers," now often take months, or years, to develop. The new driver development tools will allow manufacturers to create links to Macintoshes "in weeks."

*Embedded in System 7 will be Apple's recently announced 32-bit QuickDraw (FoLio:, July 1989, page 84), which allows display of 32-bit hill-color images.

"For a variety of reasons, we are not going to use Display PostScript,' says David LaDuke, Apple publishing markets applications specialist. Display Poscript is a workstation-based system that allows graphic elements to be scaled, rotated, skewed and altered in other ways on screen. A major problem with PostScript-based products, however, is that Adobe tightly controls the technologyand charges manufacturers hefty license fees to use it.

Instead, Apple has opted to offer its own outline font technology, which executives hope will encourage greater font development. Outline fonts are mathematical descriptions of characters that allow the computer to display textaccurately at any size on any screen or printer.

Apple's technology is also expected to eliminate problems with wrong fonts showing up on printers, caused by too many fonts using the same identification numbers. Ironically, Apple itself caused the problem years ago when it limited the number of fonts that could be handled on Macintoshes to only a few hundred, forcing font suppliers to duplicate numbers.

"Font compatibility is the number-one problem," says LaDuke. The technology ensures that the font on the screen matches the font on the output device, he says.

Adobe has agreed to supply a translator that will communicate Apple's screen fonts to PostScript printers. "We will not be turning our backs on that growing, installed base," he emphasizes.

A major selling point for System 7 is Apple's promise that it will be compatible with all existing and future Macintoshes and will run third-party software now being used. "Our goal," says LaDuke, "is to make Macintosh an island of consistency in a multi-vendor world.'

System 7 will have some shortcomings, however. Among areas Apple is working to improve, LaDuke says, are better color control-assuring, for example, that the same color is carried from device to device; better managing and tracking document databases; and better data transfer speeds over networks.

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