I see these fonts right next to each other, and I am wondering if there are any differences.
Ah, the history of type wars in the twentieth century.
In the nineteen-twenties when Stanley Morison became typographic consultant to Monotype Corporation, newspapers were still printed with nineteenth century types where the verticals are thick and the horisontals are very, very thin in emulation of copper plate printing.
Morison famously fought The Times over the legibility of its printing type, and was invited to design and develop a different form of printing type that would stand up to production with flatbed assembly, stereotyping (10% condensing after cooling) onto curved half-cylinders, and high speed presswork with thin inks and thin unmoistened and uncoated paper.
Morison looked to the printing types of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. With these types one can make an optical trick, because the bown (the counter) is asymmetric and the stress is diagonal and not vertical. This makes the type look broad, even if in fact it is condensed, a trick Matthew Carter later used at Linotype to develop Olympian as replacement for Corona.
Morison had Victor Lardent at the drawing department of The Times prepare the large scale masters, differently dimensioned for different printing sizes. From these masters, electro-mechanical pantographic routers in turn made the metal manufacturing masters for machine casting and machine composition with Monotype systems.
The Times was composed in two machine composition systems at the same time, Monotype for titling and Linotype for body copy. Therefore, the new printing type was also manufactured for Linotype composition, that is, for solid line slug casting in addition to single letter sort casting for Monotype composition.
During World War II, the Monotype works at Salfords in Surrey manufactured machine gun parts in addition to composing machine parts. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Mergenthaler Linotype company applied for a patent on the Times printing type and was granted the United States patent in the North American market.
Linotype and Monotype first converted to photo-mechanical composition in the nineteen-sixties and then to electro-photographic composition in the first half of the nineteen-seventies and to electronic composition for laser imagesetting with early page description languages and raster image processors in the second half of the nineteen-seventies.
In this process, the paper masters for metal casting machines were modified in the process of making masters for the new media. Linotype Times was modified for electro-photographic reproduction by Walter Tracy of the Linotype office in London. Walter Tracy's work became the source of the Linotype Times licenced for the Apple LaserWriter in late 1984.
Linotype had licenced Dr Peter Karow's type production tool, Ikarus, which was the first to implement type as outlines to be populated with picture elements by the raster image processor instead type as patterns of picture elements painted by the type production team in advance of rasterisation. Dr Karow's outline technology was then converted to Dr Warnock's outline technology for PostScript.
The first conversion to PostScript suffered from shortcomings, and was subsequently redone. Linotype in the first half of the nineteen-eighties was selling Linotronic imagesetters into the rapidly rising market for PostScript offset printing, with the Linotype Adobe Type 1 Library as the preferred type library for the new production platform.
Monotype entered into a licence agreement with Adobe in late 1988, and in 1989 the bottom went out of the type market when Apple and Microsoft announced the TrueType Alliance with the promise of publishing a free TrueType Specification, Adobe announced that that the Adobe Type 1 specification would be published, Sun Microsystems acquired Folio and announced that the Sun F3 font format would be available, and Agfa acquired Compugraphic after which Agfa-Compugraphic contracted with Hewlett-Packard to provide the Agfa-Compugraphic Intellifont technology for the Hewlett-Packard Printer Control Language page description language.
Apple developed TrueType 1 with Linotype Times and Linotype Helvetica as models for gridfitting the same as Linotype Times and Linotype Helvetica had been developed as models for Adobe Type 1 gridfitting. Microsoft did not have the rights to Linotype Times and Linotype Helvetic, so Microsoft approached Monotype for comparable core fonts. Monotype then developed Times (New) Roman for TrueType, and a close match for Linotype Helvetica, Monotype Arial (named after the spirit in Shakespeare's The Tempest?).
Linotype Times, Monotype Times New Roman, Linotype Helvetica, and Monotype Arial are the four type faces that have attracted most engineering attention in the development of technologies to automatically fit an outline to a raster grid.
/hh
