Secrecy and Technical Changes
➜ The development path of Thailand’s font industry has not been smooth; there had been hiccups on the road towards digital typography. Many of the hiccups were due to the desire to confine the technical know-how to only a limited circle of practitioners. But the picture is changing. Today practically any one could learn how to create a workable font file.
The practice of guarding knowledge from spreading to the wider community has been deep-rooted in many spheres of activity. People who maintain such secrecy believe it affords them with an extra bargaining edge. Such a notion might be valid. But equally true is that their unwillingness to share know-how will eventually erode their ability to catch up with changes in technology.
Many designers would recall the hiccups we have had from the days of ASCII fonts to the present era of OpenType. Many of the issues in those days stemmed from the desire for secrecy as well as the lack of proper planning and management in font development. Problems were exacerbated by changes in computer architecture as well as software requirements. And it was not until the arrival of the Unicode Standard that the bulk of the problems were eventually resolved.
Fortunately for the Thai font industry, the flow of ideas and know-how is no longer restricted. Open access to knowledge and concepts is now becoming a universal practice. This has been instrumental in stimulating discussions, new ideas, experiments and competition – all of which will contribute to development and progress.
As tools for communication, digital fonts are subject to changes and development just like any other device in our daily use. On the global platform, the availability of the OpenType font format plus the Unicode Standard will enable a greater degree of accessibility and communication across a wide range of languages and across nations’ borders. With Unicode, the world’s major languages can be systematically organized and displayed on any computer; data can be transported across different systems without corruption.
The advent of OpenType fonts coincides with openness in the font industry. This has led to wide availability of font technologies and application software, which is all well and good. But among young designers today, the emphasis is more on technical savvies rather than on creativity. Many would rely on the computer as a crutch, not as a tool to aid design. Such dominance of machine over imagination is quite noticeable in many areas of computer-aided design.
With OpenType and openness, the font industry in Thailand appeared to be split into two streams: technical-related and design-related. Over the past couple of years, the design aspect of the industry has reached a new height in popularity. This has been the result of openness which has enabled equitable access to all of the necessary basic techniques, which has, in turn, allowed a never-before degree of design facilitation. Such a development is to be welcomed; for if we are to compare the scene today with that of the secretive 1990s, it appears that the era of secrecy has come to an end.