I recently started using iWork, and I have been Office 04 user. I noticed that I do not have Times New Roman fonts. There are Times, and Times LatinArm, but where are Times New Roman fonts?
Ah, the wars that once were, and where grass now grows green on the graves -:)
Stanley Morison, typographic advisor to the Monotype Corporation, talked The Times of London into a change of printing type. Technically, nineteenth century and early twentieth century printing type looks narrow because it has vertical stress, with thick verticals and thin horizontals. This makes the type prone to mechanical problems in stereotyping the letterpress half-cylinders and in letterpress printing itself. Further, the type is in fact not narrow.
The trick Stanely Morison and Victor Lardent, who did the technical drawings, discovered, was that if the angle of stress is not vertical, as in nineteenth century Didone style (Bodoni and Didot), but tilted as in sixteenth century Garalde style (Garamond and Aldus), the type can be narrower geometrically and look wider visually. This selfsame trick was used by Matthew Carter in replacing Linotype Corona with Linotype Olympian for newspaper composition in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies.
Now, Times was produced as well for Monotype composition as for Linotype composition as both were used in printing The Times. Times became hugely popular, and during the way Linotype in the United States in a spirit of wartime fraternity claimed the right to make and market Times, without the consent of Monotype in the United Kingdom. And so began the war in which many gave much and few won much.
In the nineteen-seventies, Walter Tracy who at the time was art director for Linotype, redesigned Times and this is the Times that was chosen by Steven Jobs and John Warnock for the Apple LaserWriter introduced in January 1985. When Microsoft licenced the TrueType spline programming language and the SFNT Spline Font file format from Apple, the implementation for Microsoft Windows led Microsoft to turn to Monotype for the original Times which then came to be called Times New Roman.
This in turn led to a second war since Monotype did not have the original Palatino, introduced in the Apple LaserWriter Plus in August 1985. The original Palatino, drawn by Prof Zapf, was made and marketed by Linotype. So in the spirit in which Linotype lifted Times, Monotype lifted Palatino. Prof Zapf was so angry that he abandoned his membership of ATypI, an organization that purportedly protects the rights of people who spend their professional lives drawing type.
So, if you need Times New Roman, find a machine with Microsoft Windows and copy the TrueType font file to your Apple Mac OS machine. Apple and Microsoft agreed at the Seybold Conference on Computer Publishing in September 1989 that the TrueType spline programming language and the SFNT Spline Font file format should be cross-platform, and that it what it is. Though it would be a bit more cross-platform if Microsoft supported Apple line layout logic the way Apple supports Microsoft line layout logic.
Best wishes,
Henrik Holmegaard
technical writer
