One of my favourite things about RISC OS was the font manager: At the time, it was normal for every application to manage its own fonts (Macintosh may have been an exception), but on RISC OS, fonts were shared between applications. Not only that, but the same renderer was used for screen use and printing, so you really had WYSIWYG, unlike the Mac, which used different rendering on screen and paper (using PostScript for printing and something else for screen use), which resulted in subtle differences, including things that lined up perfectly on screen being not even closely lined up in print (that hit me several times when using the university Mac). Furthermore, the screen renderer used anti-aliasing, so edges would not appear as ragged (on the fairly limited screen resolution), and allowed characters to be positioned at quarter-pixel resolution. And you could scale fonts to any size, as they were rendered from cubic Bezier curves.
This was 1988. TrueType for Mac was not until 1981, and it used quadratic Bezier curves, which are inferior to cubic, and AFAIR did not use anti-aliasing and the hinting system was inferior to that used by RISC OS.
I really wish Acorn had licensed their font technology to other companies, but like many other of their technologies (such as Econet and the video codec used by RISC OS) Acorn developed these for their own use only. It is almost a miracle that the ARM processor escaped the Acorn-only fate of so many other technologies.
This was 1988. TrueType for Mac was not until 1981, and it used quadratic Bezier curves, which are inferior to cubic, and AFAIR did not use anti-aliasing and the hinting system was inferior to that used by RISC OS.
I really wish Acorn had licensed their font technology to other companies, but like many other of their technologies (such as Econet and the video codec used by RISC OS) Acorn developed these for their own use only. It is almost a miracle that the ARM processor escaped the Acorn-only fate of so many other technologies.