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Beowulf was a Type 3 PostScript font, not Type 1, so that it could bypass the font cache and could access random numbers on the LaserWriter PostScript interpreter.

Type 3 fonts don't have hinting in the renderer, and require a full PostScript interpreter, so they have never been widely supported.

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manv1|3 years ago

I saw this and went back to the black book to read up, and yeah, type 1s are limited to a certain subset of PS because the font is pre-tokenized.

Interesting I never noticed that before now.

FYI Type 3s were totally widely supported, and supported by everything that supported Type 1s. Type 3s may not have worked with ATM, but I had a huge collection of fonts and never remember seeing a Type 3 font that didn't render correctly. I did have commercial fonts from real foundries, so maybe the ones made by people didn't render.