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 (soft copy) permits more rapid sharing of information and acceleration of new knowledge; however, barriers to soft-copy document distribution have arisen out of the very diversity of the tools currently available in publishing technology. Solving these problems requires development of a public font standard and new tools and services. A cooperative effort is now under way among graphic arts professionals, representatives of industry, and national and international standards-making organizations to develop such a standard and the associated tools and services.