Hoefler Text is an old-style serif font by Jonathan Hoefler and released by Apple Computer in 1991 to showcase advanced type technologies. Intended as a versatile.

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A modern classic. Steeped in the virtues of classical typography, Hoefler Text is a comprehensive family of typefaces from the dawn of the digital age. When Jonathan Hoefler founded the company in 1989, digital typography was in its infancy. Few of the great type foundries had embraced electronic publishing in any significant way, and those that had were just beginning to tentatively remaster their most famous fonts for use on personal computers. Manufacturing their most important faces first, at a time when their production processes were at their weakest, meant that some of the world’s greatest typefaces were quickly becoming some of the world’s worst fonts. It’s no wonder that mossbacked traditionalists were so skeptical of the computer. While the market for digital type was untested, the possibilities of the medium were apparent.

For those font users willing to submit to annoying workarounds (remember the “expert set?”), digital type offered the potential for fonts to be not merely as good as traditional ones, but demonstrably better than anything that had gone before. Hoefler Text, designed in 1991, was an opening salvo in the fight for fine typography. Following on the heels of the Adobe Originals program, which had just begun to introduce designers to such far-out concepts as “old-style figures” and “small caps,” Hoefler Text resuscitated a number of other traditions that had once been central to fine printing: extended, the of the early twentieth century, and the of the renaissance. Hoefler Text even invented a few traditions of its own, such as and, and worked to expand the reach of digital typography beyond the United States by including a wealth of foreign symbols and accents. Hoefler Text’s steadfast agenda sparked the interest of developers at Apple, where a fledgling technology called “TrueType GX” was being created with the goal of making fine typography not only available to everyone, but effortless to use.

Apple commissioned us to further expand the fonts, and licensed Hoefler Text for inclusion in System 7, the Macintosh operating system. While GX never emerged as a viable font format for designers, it did fulfill its original promise of turning Hoefler Text’s “advanced features” into a new baseline for digital typography. In the years since, small caps and old-style figures have become standard issue with the best text faces from all of the world’s great type foundries. Features.

Expression. Hoefler Text’s character set is designed with all the trimmings, from swashes and italic small caps to two fonts of engraved capitals.

Grand Italics. In every weight, Hoefler Text offers a number of ways to change the flavor of its italics, from merely special to full-blown decadent.

Arabesques & Patterns. Borrowing the ideas of a clever sixteenth century typefounder, Hoefler Text includes characters for creating an infinite number of decorative patterns. A companion set of engraved capitals was once a sign of quality in a text face. Hoefler Text contains two. Special Characters.

Fractions and monetary marks for technical settings, an expanded ligature set for foreign words, and a long-s for historical printing; it’s all inside. Language Support.

Hoefler Text features our Latin-X™ character set, covering more than 140 languages throughout the world — including all of Central Europe.

Among those who draw letters for a living, Gotham is most notable for being the crowning achievement of two of the leaders of their tribe, Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler. The two men seemed to be on parallel paths since the summer of 1970, when they were both born in New York.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones were already prominent designers when they began operating as Hoefler&Frere-Jones in 1999, having decided to join forces instead of continuing their race to be type design’s top boy wonder. Each would serve as an editor for the other, and they would combine their efforts to promote the work they did together. Colleagues still struggle to explain what a big deal this was at the time. Debbie Millman, president emeritus of AIGA, the major trade organization for graphic designers, begins by comparing them to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, then stops.

“They were famous before they got together, so that’s how they’re not like the Beatles. It’s more like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,” she says, before pausing again. “You know what—I’ll tell you what they were like.

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They were like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.”. Photograph by Charlie Neibergall/AP For 15 years, Frere-Jones and Hoefler seemed charmed. They made typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks.

They created an, based on the team’s logo. And they saw their lettering as part of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.

Last year, the duo won the AIGA Medal, the profession’s highest award. It seemed to be one of those rare situations whereby two successful soloists had combined to make an even better supergroup. Hoefler was asked if there were any troubles in their working relationship for a video produced for the AIGA in 2013. “We do have a over the height of the lower case t,” he said. “That is the only point of contention.” Not quite. In January, Frere-Jones filed a lawsuit against Hoefler, saying that their company was not actually a partnership, but a long con in which Hoefler had tricked him into signing over the rights to all of his work, cheating Frere-Jones out of his half of the business. “In the most profound treachery and sustained exploitation of friendship, trust and confidence, Hoefler accepted all the benefits provided by Frere-Jones while repeatedly promising Frere-Jones that he would give him the agreed equity, only to refuse to do so when finally demanded,”.

Frere-Jones is asking a court to grant him $20 million. Hoefler won’t comment on the suit directly, but the day after it was filed a lawyer for the company issued a brief statement disputing the claims, which, it said, “.” (About Gotham’s creation, Hoefler writes in an email: “No one is disputing Tobias’s role in those projects, or my own, for that matter. Our typefaces have had a lot of other contributors, as well — everything we do here is a team effort.”) According to the company statement, Frere-Jones was not Hoefler’s partner but a “longtime employee.”. When Frere-Jones enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988, there was no course of study for type designers. He took what lettering classes they had and was partway through an independent study when his professor admitted that he had nothing more to teach his student, advising Frere-Jones to go to Cambridge, Mass., and show his half-finished font to Matthew Carter, perhaps the world’s most prominent type designer. Carter recommended Frere-Jones for a job at the Font Bureau, a Boston-based font foundry.

Frere-Jones began doing freelance work there, and he joined full-time when he graduated in 1992. Photograph by Jean Francois Porchez A few hours south, a second young man from Manhattan was making a name in the world of letters. Jonathan Hoefler was also a kid caught between two passions: in his case, computers and graphic design. Hoefler didn’t go straight to college after high school, instead finding freelance work designing lettering and logos. He also began teaching himself computer programming, enabling him to automate portions of the process.

It was a fortuitous time for a type designer to come of age. By the late 1980s the personal computer had begun to loosen the hold that big European font houses such as Linotype and Monotype had on the market. It was increasingly possible to sell directly to publications and designers, skipping layers of middlemen that typified the existing system. “I cut all that out and went straight to the end users, and that is because I knew all of them,” says Hoefler, who had set up an office in a 320-square-foot cubbyhole in downtown Manhattan. “I knew all the art directors in the city because I was the weird young kid with the Macintosh who knew the names of all the fonts.” “If you go back and look at the old logo, you can see the deal that we made.

There are two names there, the same size, side by side, not one over the other.” Hoefler cultivated a rolodex of graphic designers who became his clients, but he really rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early ’90s by designing typefaces for magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine. At the same time, Hoefler began selling fonts to individuals through his website, on which customers could print out an order form, fax in a request, and receive a disc of their desired fonts in the mail. In the 1990s, changing industry economics was affecting its aesthetics, too. The democratization of the tools of the trade had given rise to so-called, which trafficked in angst and messiness. Neither Frere-Jones nor Hoefler took to that trend, preferring a cleaner style based on historic typefaces.

Both men were also scouring the Internet for books of samples of source materials. These were not the most well-traveled of EBay auctions, and Frere-Jones and Hoefler found themselves competing for titles.

Given the relatively small number of skilled type designers, they were also facing off for commissions. The two began bouncing ideas off one another. Citing the lawsuit, Hoefler declines to discuss any aspect of his relationship with Frere-Jones, including how they started working together or how things went sour; nor will he address any substantive issues in the complaint. Frere-Jones says that Hoefler began floating the idea of working together in the mid ’90s, jokingly proposing that they start a company called “Tobias and Jonathan’s Excellent Adventure (LLC).” One evening in 1999, Frere-Jones says Hoefler took him to the Gotham Bar and Grill and made a formal proposal that they become partners.

Frere-Jones says the pitch centered largely on the idea that he wasn’t reaping the full benefit of his work at Font Bureau. He says he thought he was entering a full partnership in which the two would jointly control intellectual property, share business decisions, and have their names on the door. Photograph by Kathy Willens/AP His view was widely shared within the industry.

When the two were awarded the AIGA medal last year, the company was described as a partnership. As part of the suit, Frere-Jones provided a series of e-mails in which Hoefler refers to Frere-Jones as a partner in communications with potential clients, the press, and Frere-Jones himself. “Never did it cross my mind that they weren’t equal partners,” says Bonnie Siegler of Eight and a Half, a designer who is friends with both men. “If you go back and look at the old logo, you can see the deal that we made,” says Frere-Jones. “There are two names there—the same size, side by side, not one over the other.” While this is a compelling argument from a design perspective, it may not persuade a court.

One place where Hoefler has never referred to Frere-Jones as his partner is on any kind of contract. In legal documents, the firm was described as the Hoefler Type Foundry, doing business as Hoefler&Frere-Jones. Frere-Jones says he never drafted paperwork to formalize the partnership he thought he was entering, nor did he hire a lawyer to examine the contract in which he signed over the rights to the fonts he had created at the Font Bureau for $10. In 2004 Frere-Jones also signed an employment agreement describing him as an employee of the firm.

Both men agree that Frere-Jones signed this document, and the case is likely to turn in part on what the contract means—was he the firm’s employee? Or Hoefler’s? “I don’t think there’s anyone I’ve talked to who hasn’t had a run-in with Jonathan.” Frere-Jones says that he agreed to this because Hoefler was always promising to formalize the partnership soon. In 2003 the two drew up a press release saying they had become full partners, according to Frere-Jones’s suit.

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It apparently never went out. There was always a project to be finished first, a commission on deadline, an aspect of the business that needed Hoefler’s urgent attention. Why would Frere-Jones allow 14 years to pass without formalizing such an important aspect of the business? He is at a loss to explain. “It would seem bizarre for this to not follow through, that we would just put all this work and patience into building this new company, and I put all this work into designing all of these typefaces,” he says. “It would, you know, it didn’t even occur to me that there would be some—you know.

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That I would get stonewalled.” By Frere-Jones’s account, the situation reached a head last fall. He began pushing Hoefler to make his co-ownership of the business official earlier in 2013.

21, he says Hoefler told him that a partnership was “not going to happen.” Frere-Jones began planning to leave and eventually departed in January. While Hoefler declined to discuss when the fracture started, there is evidence that he also saw October as a turning point. Over two days, first on Oct. 21 and then again in early November, a handful of Web domains related to Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s names were purchased. Some of these, such as HoeflerCo.com, seem to hint at a company without Frere-Jones. Others are derived from Frere-Jones’ name, like TFJType.com, TFJFonts.com, and FJType.com.

Anyone who types these URLs into a Web browser is now redirected to typography.com, the homepage of Hoefler&Co. When asked about the domain names, Hoefler writes in an e-mail: “The company maintains dozens of domains that are variations of its registered trademarks, in keeping with best practices.” Jonathan Hoefler still works at the same building in which he set up shop 22 years ago, although he has more space. Hoefler&Co, as the firm is now called, operates out of a tidy office above a Crate & Barrel (a store that laid out its logo in Helvetica—except for the first letter, setting off a minor typographical controversy).

Hoefler does not seem like a man going through a divorce. During a recent visit, he was all smiles as he pointed out attributes of various ampersands with help from books he pulled down from shelves. He recounted the untold genius of Henrik van de Keere, a 16th century Flemish punchcutter whose work is the basis for a font the company is working on; expounded on the difficulties of designing typefaces in non-Western scripts; and asked an employee to demonstrate code that automatically adds shadowing to letters, taking a repetitious task out of human hands.