Adobe Font Folio

» see adobe.com/products/fontfolio.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Font Folio was sold to prepress houses and design studios, and I have never been either. What makes it worth writing down is the price, and what the price tells you about how software used to be bought.

Adobe announced it as Adobe Type Folio at the Seybold desktop publishing conference in September 1988 and shipped it that November. What you got for your money was a 45-megabyte external hard disk with more than three hundred PostScript Type 1 typefaces on it, which you attached by SCSI either to a computer or directly to a PostScript printer. The money was $9,600.

The format kept changing and the price kept climbing. In 1990 it was 650 fonts on a CD-ROM, bundled with an external NEC drive to read it, for $15,900. There was an 80-megabyte hard disk version that year at $16,900. By 1992 Adobe was shipping 250 packages of the Type Library on a 105-megabyte drive for $14,000, and by 1994 the CD held around 1,800 Type 1 fonts.

Then it settled into a numbered product. Version 7 arrived on 13 March 1995 with over two thousand typefaces and the first support for Silicon Graphics and Sun workstations. Version 8 came in September 1997. Version 9 followed in January 2001 with OpenType starting to appear in the mix, and version 10 in August 2003 took the name Font Folio OpenType Edition. Version 11 landed on 5 September 2007 at $8,999 for twenty users, with a five-machine license at $2,599 for studios that could not justify the big one. The last one, 11.1, shipped on 21 December 2011 with 2,433 fonts in it.

It then sat unchanged for a decade before Adobe turned it off. End of sale was 1 June 2022 for both Font Folio 11.1 and Font Folio Education Essentials. Support ended on 31 December 2022.

~ the dossier ~

~ when type came on a hard disk ~

The detail that does not translate to anyone who started later is that the fonts were the hardware. You did not download Font Folio and you did not really install it in the modern sense. Adobe sold you a physical drive with the library on it, and the reason it could go straight into a PostScript printer is that the printer was the thing that actually needed to know the outlines.

That is also why the early prices read like industrial equipment rather than software. A shop buying Type Folio in 1988 was buying a capability for the whole building, and $9,600 against a Linotype bill was not the insult it looks like now.

~ the version that stopped being bought ~

Font Folio 11.1 was current from December 2011 until the day it died, which is ten and a half years without a release. The market had moved underneath it. Typekit arrived at Adobe in 2011 and became Adobe Fonts, and a Creative Cloud subscription started including most of the same foundry library at no extra charge. Once the fonts came free with the software you were already renting, a perpetual license at four figures had nobody left to sell to.

The quiet casualty inside this is Multiple Master, Adobe's interpolating font technology from 1991. Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2004 for everybody except customers who owned the Font Folio 9 library, which made a discontinued product the last place a discontinued format was still officially maintained.

~ what the timing was really about ~

Font Folio's end of support fell on 31 December 2022, and in January 2023 Adobe ended support for PostScript Type 1 fonts across its applications. Those two dates are three weeks apart and they are the same event. Type 1 was the format Font Folio was born in back in 1988, the one that put those three hundred outlines on that first SCSI drive, and Adobe closed the account on the library and the format in the same winter.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »