This necessitated Adobe Type Manager (ATM), a utility software that sat between the system and the application, rendering smooth letterforms on the fly. But memory was scarce. A standard computer in the PageMaker heyday might have 4 megabytes of RAM. Opening a PageMaker document with high-resolution graphics and multiple font families loaded was a recipe for the dreaded "Bomb" icon or a system freeze.
If the printer didn’t have the font, PageMaker would cough up a generic Courier, a monospaced typewriter font that screamed "ERROR" to anyone reading the proof. This was the "Courier substitution"—the scarlet letter of the early digital designer. pagemaker fonts