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Comment by murgindrag | Hacker News Reader

And this seems like yet another good reason to drop Adobe.

I want things I author to be archival, not ephemeral.

* Dropping Flash? Good idea. Dropping Flash with no compatibility/emulation path? Bad idea.

* Switching to license servers from owning software? Bad idea.

And so on. I like the things I do, and I like many of thing things I did 35 years ago too. I'd be sad to see them dead. At the end of the day, I'm willing to take a productivity hit to ensure that if I do create something really good, it's eternal.

Even in retirement, someday, I won't expect to be able to afford the Adobe tax. Do I want my creative work disappearing? No.

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I get your sentiment, but what Adobe does is of almost no consequence to the rest of the world. Type 1 fonts can never go away, and are required to be implemented in one form or another.

For example, the actual outlines (once losslessly transformed into CFF/Type 2) are required to be supported by any OpenType-speaking rasterization engine until the end of time; this is as per ISO/IEC 14496-22 aka MPEG4 Part 22, a specification that is mostly Microsoft contributions, building on top of Apple's TrueType font specification (which was also adopted by Microsoft circa Windows 3.1). Adobe's only contribution to any of this was providing Type 1/Type 2 glyph support (which was already standardized as ISO 9541).

Adobe's proposed replacement, which never was adopted, is Type 3: Type 1/2 fonts, but with the full power of Postscript to manage the actual rendering (as to do hand-tuned hinting, and such). This was designed to be a push into display-oriented fonts, instead of only having a font format that is optimal for print...

Except TrueType hinting already has existed for 30 years, and hand-hinting is falling out of fashion as 200%+ DPI is becoming the norm. In the future, we're just going to go back to grayscale AA, no hand-hinting at 9-14px ranges, no subpixel rendering, and at this scale hinting at all has a negligible effect.

Type 3 is not supported by OpenType's OTF or by WOFF, yet I can transform existing Type 1 formats (of which there are several) into OTF or WOFF, and continue using them with Freetype, DirectWrite, OSX's renderer, and in all major web browsers, with their glyphs exactly as intended by the original artist.

People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author fonts. They are not the best in class, and also produce fonts that don't comply with the relevant specifications.

People, usually, do not use Adobe tools to author PDFs. They are not the best in class, and also produce PDFs that don't comply with the relevant specifications.

I can repeat this statement for basically everything Adobe makes: of formats they invented, they don't comply with their own specification while everyone else does, and there is a better domain-specific tool out there that replaces the use of them.

The only counter-example in Adobe's entire portfolio is Photoshop: it's not great at every specific use, but its the swiss army chainsaw of raster image manipulation; there's several better tools that do a specific task much better, but nobody has been idiotic enough to produce a tool that does all of them mediocrely at the same time.

> nobody has been idiotic enough to produce a tool that does all of them mediocrely at the same time

Nothing wrong with (GIMP, Affinity Photo, PaintShop Pro, Pixelmator Pro, etc.) but since Photoshop is subscription-only I went all in and have replaced it in all of my workflows with the obvious superior alternative: Microsoft Paint.

There are certain file formats that are explicitly designed to be archival safe, like PDF/A. For long term stability, I always try to export a copy to one of those.

File formats like .doc or .psd that are tied to evolving product lines are bound to change eventually. They're great for working copies, but I don't expect those file formats to still be readable in 10-20 years. Unless the file format explicitly calls out long-term archival as a feature, I assume a PM will eventually change the file format and break things.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

You can still read doc files from 20 years ago. Microsoft is very good at keeping backwards compatibility. I would be surprised if they decide to change course and start breaking things.

In some sense.

I've seen documents written in some version of Microsoft Word that were noticably broken when read into a later version of Microsoft Word.

It's a tough problem. The original Microsoft Word file format wasn't even really a file format in the way that modern developers think. It was basically just a dump of raw memory blocks to disk, with the necessary adjustments to pointers between blocks. That made it very fast to save and load files on old hardware. But using such formats with modern code bases is extremely difficult and error prone, even if you have all the original source code.

20 years ago isn't a very long time.

Uhhh, Adobe has almost unprecedented backwards compatibility.

I also dropped Adobe for Affinity because of price, but frankly, your reaction is not warranted for this news... good luck opening 35 year old Photoshop file with anything else than Photoshop.

That would be their fault - they intentionally provide an incomplete specification for their proprietary formats. It is a compatibility nightmare - there is no telling what kind of corruption or information loss an older version of the software will introduce when dealing with a file produced by a subsequent release, as there are no well defined specs to guarantee forward compatibility. Of course... you could just use an open standard file format and skip all the pain on display in Adobe's forums.

Tex has unprecedented backwards-compatibility. Microsoft does pretty well too. Adobe is a mixed bag. Calling it "almost unprecedented" is simply dishonest.

My 30-year-old Photoshop files used PostScript fonts. Even multiple master fonts, which don't have the same broad support as mainstream PS fonts.

Good luck opening them with Photoshop.

Truth be told, most of my 30-year-old files are in PageMaker.

InDesign has some support for them for a while, but dropped support. Adobe's official line is "Open the PageMaker files in Indesign CS6 or an earlier version first, and then save them to native Indesign Format (.indd ). Once the files are saved in InDesign format, Indesign can open the files."

Of course, Adobe won't sell you old versions of InDesign to do that with, so YMMV.

I dropped Adobe for Affinity not so much for price, but because I can buy the software and use it forever. Even when I retire. I still have an Adobe subscription (paid for by someone else), but I don't use it.

Apple and Microsoft have also been removing support for PostScript fonts, so this is not just Adobe making this move. The entire tech industry is moving away from this old tech. I won't be surprised if support for EPS files (embedded postscript) gets dropped eventually.

it's not like there aren't a million tools to read postscript type 1 fonts. I think your documents are probably safe

Having software that can interpret type 1 fonts doesn’t help in getting Photoshop to keep reading those fonts.

Can Animate not open Flash files?

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