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One of the oft maligned weaknesses of AmigaOS 1.x was that the included bitmap fonts were not very good, especially when compared to those included with Classic Mac OS. Commodore closed this gap with AmigaOS 2.x by licensing and porting the Intellifont vector fonts, which were higher quality and scalable.

At almost exactly the same time, Apple rolled out TrueType, and "The rest is History". Except, what happened to the Intellifont format? Did it migrate, change names, get absorbed, or simply "disappear"?

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  • Interesting question, brings up memories. Wasn't it licenced by Agfa to HP as well, to be included in some of their printers PCL? I think they still support it.
    – Raffzahn
    Nov 20, 2021 at 2:48
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    When a printer supports PCL5, it should also support Intellifont - It's part of it.
    – tofro
    Nov 20, 2021 at 11:06

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The need for IntelliFont (FAIS) format fonts kind of fizzled out, and Agfa concentrated on its industrial printing side from the late 1990s. Initially, Adobe wouldn't give a licence or open up their vector font formats to anyone. This prompted several competing vendors to produce vector font libraries in their own formats. Agfa-Compugraphic's IntelliFont was one of them.

The threat of Apple's TrueType forced Adobe to rethink their licensing strategy. Once the Adobe Type 1 format was documented, font foundries rushed to use it for the publishing market, while business picked up TrueType. The need for the other formats went away.

HP licensed IntelliFont for their PCL laser printers, and for a while you could get add-on cartridges and disks that provided more fonts in Intellifont format. But these disappeared soon after screen vector fonts were able to be downloaded to printers.

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