Typographic Toner đ¨
Looking back at the period in which fonts used to come on cartridges for laser printersâand why Hewlett-Packard didnât particularly mind.
We take fonts for granted in the modern eraâswitching one is often as easy as going to Google Fonts, which has more than enough typographic choices for any non-professional use case.
But this very much was not the case in the 1980s, when digital typography first emerged from the primordial soup that was PostScript and the laser printer. It can feel like modern typography just works, and you donât have to think about it, but in the 1980s, it could be a huge bill on top of the even bigger bill for your top-of-the-line printer.
As Jim Hall, a longtime manager at HPâs Idaho facility, wrote in a history of the HP LaserJet that HP had initially treated fonts in the same way it treats printer ink and toner today:
Fonts were a challenge for the first LaserJets. Semiconductor memory was very expensive and customer font requirements very fragmented. For those reasons, we elected to offer a limited number of âbuilt-inâ fonts and supply the rest in optional font cartridges. This satisfied mainstream users, kept the printer cost low and still gave customers a way to satisfy their special font requirements. Font cartridges (and fonts) became another responsibility for [HP employee] Janet Buschert. Through her efforts, this soon became a major business in its own right with more than 25 different cartridges at prices ranging from $150 to $330 each. It remained a good business for us into the early â90s when Microsoft started bundling fonts with their Windows operating system.
It turns out that, despite Microsoftâs font-bundling removing a revenue source for HP, the company actually saw it as a good thing, per Hall.
Now, if only we can get Microsoft to come up with a way to get us free toner.
Âť Wanna learn more? Check out the history of digital typography technology, including how Adobe really felt about TrueType.
âDingbatsâ written in Chancery is a lovely detail. âSymbolâ gets plain old Schoolbook, but Dingbats gets its creatorâs other font.