Toward a new beginning: The development of a standard for font and character encoding to control electronic document interchange

Distribution of documents in electronic form, often called soft copy, permits more rapid sharing of information and the acceleration of new knowledge; however, barriers to soft-copy document distribution have arisen out of the diversity of the tools currently available in publishing technology. The authors address solving these problems by means of the development of a public font standard, and novel tools and services. They describe a cooperative effort now under way among graphic arts professionals, representatives of industry, and national and international standards-making organizations to develop such a standard along with the associated tools and services.