A font is the combination of typeface and other qualities, such as size, pitch, and spacing. For example, Times Roman is a typeface that defines the shape of each character. Within Times Roman, however, there are many fonts to choose from -- different sizes, italic, bold, and so on.A font is a set of printable or displayable text character s in a specific style and size. The type design for a set of fonts is the typeface and variations of this design form the typeface family . Thus, Helvetica is a typeface family, Helvetica italic is a typeface, and Helvetica italic 10-point is a font.
POINT SIZE
The height of characters in a font is measured in points, each point being approximately 1/72 inch. The width is measured by pitch, which refers to how many characters can fit in an inch. Common pitch values are 10 and 12. A font is said to be fixed pitch if every character has the same width. If the widths vary depending on the shape of the character, it is called a proportional font.
Most applications that support text enable you to choose from among many fonts. Laser, ink-jet, and dot-matrix printers offer the widest selection of fonts. These printers support a certain set of resident fonts, but you can expand this set by loading different fonts from software (soft fonts) or from font cartridges.
COMPUTER FONT
A computer font (or font) is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term font first referred to a set of metal type sorts in one style and size, since the 1990s most fonts are digital, used on computers.
TRUE TYPE FONTS
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes. With widely varying rendering technologies in use today, pixel-level control is no longer certain in a TrueType font.
The system was developed and eventually released as TrueType with the launch of Mac OS System 7 in May 1991. The initial Truetype outline fonts, four-weight families of Times Roman, Helvetica, Courier, and the Pi font replicated the original PostScript fonts of the Apple LaserWriter. Apple also replaced some of their bitmap fonts used by the graphical user-interface of previous Macintosh System versions (including Geneva, Monaco and New York) with scalable
Truetype outline-fonts. For compatibility with older systems, Apple shipped these fonts, a TrueType Extension and a TrueType-aware version of Font/DA Mover for System Software 6. For compatibility with the Laserwriter II, Apple developed fonts like ITC Bookman and ITC Chancery in True type format.
All of these fonts could now scale to all sizes on screen and printer, making the Macintosh System 7 the first OS to work without any bitmap fonts. The early TrueType systems — being still part of Apple's QuickDraw graphics subsystem — did not render Type 1 fonts on-screen as they do today. At the time, many users had already invested considerable money in Adobe's still proprietary Type 1 fonts.
As part of Apple's tactic of opening the font format versus Adobe's desire to keep it closed to all but Adobe licensees, Apple licensed TrueType to Microsoft. When TrueType and the license to Microsoft was announced, John Warnock of Adobe gave an impassioned speech in which he claimed Apple and Microsoft were selling snake oil, and then announced that the Type 1 format was open for anyone to use.
Meanwhile, in exchange for True type, Apple got a license for True Image, a PostScript-compatible page-description language owned by Microsoft that Apple could use in their laser printers. This was never actually included in any Apple products when a later deal was struck between Apple and Adobe, where Adobe promised to put a TrueType interpreter in their PostScript printer boards. Apple renewed its agreements with Adobe for the use of PostScript in its printers, resulting in lower royalty payments to Adobe, who was beginning to license printer controllers capable of competing directly with Apple's LaserWriter printers.
ATM FONTS
Part of Adobe's response to learning that TrueType was being developed was to create the Adobe Type Manager software to scale Type 1 fonts for anti-aliased output on-screen. Although ATM initially cost money, rather than coming free with the operating system, it became a de facto standard for anyone involved in desktop publishing. Anti-aliased rendering, combined with Adobe applications' ability to zoom in to read small type, and further combined with the now open PostScript Type 1 font format, provided the impetus for an explosion in font design and in desktop publishing of newspapers and magazines.
Apple extended TrueType with the launch of TrueType GX in 1994, with additional tables in the sfnt which formed part of QuickDraw GX. This offered powerful extensions in two main areas. First was font axes (morphing), for example allowing fonts to be smoothly adjusted from light to bold or from narrow to extended — competition for Adobe's "multiple master" technology. Second was Line Layout Manager, where particular sequences of characters can be coded to flip to different designs in certain circumstances, useful for example to offer ligatures for "fi", "ffi", "ct", etc. while maintaining the backing store of characters necessary for spell-checkers and text searching. However, the lack of user-friendly tools for making TrueType GX fonts meant there were no more than a handful of GX fonts.
- To ensure its wide adoption, Apple licensed TrueType to Microsoft for free By 1991 Microsoft added TrueType into theWindows 3.1 operating system.
- TrueType has long been the most common format for fonts on both Mac OS and Windows,
Difference between TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType fonts?
TrueType fonts can be scaled to any size and are clear and readable in all sizes. They can be sent to any printer or other output device that is supported by Windows.
OpenType fonts are related to TrueType fonts, but they incorporate a greater extension of the basic character set, including small capitalization, old-style numerals, and more detailed shapes, such as glyphs and ligatures.
OpenType fonts can also be scaled to any size, are clear and readable in all sizes, and can be sent to any printer or other output device that is supported by Windows.
Post Script fonts are smooth, detailed, and of high quality. They are often used for printing, especially professional-quality printing, such as books or magazines.
Which font format will work best for me?
It depends. If you want a font that prints well and is easy to read on the screen, then consider using a TrueType font. If you need a large character set for language coverage and fine typography, then you might want to use an OpenType font. If you need to print professional-quality print publications, such as glossy magazines or commercial printing, PostScript is a good choice. For more information,
OPEN TYPE FONTS
Accommodates the Unicode character encoding (as well as others), so that it can support any writing script (or multiple scripts at once). accommodates up to 65,536 glyphs. Advanced typographic layout features which prescribe positioning and replacement of rendered glyphs. Replacement features include ligatures; positioning features include kerning, mark placement, and baseline specification. Cross-platform font files, which can be used without modification on Mac OS, Windows and Unix systems
History
Open Type origins date to Microsoft's attempt to license Apple's advanced typography technology GX Typography in the early 1990s. Those negotiations failed, motivating Microsoft to forge ahead with its own technology, dubbed "TrueType Open" in 1994. Adobe joined Microsoft in those efforts in 1996, adding support for the glyph outline technology used in its Type 1 fonts.
These efforts were intended by Microsoft and Adobe to supersede both Apple's TrueType and Adobe's Type 1 ("PostScript") font formats. Needing a more expressive font format to handle fine typography and the complex behavior of many of the world's writing systems, the two companies combined the underlying technologies of both formats and added new extensions intended to address those formats' limitations. The name Open Type was chosen for the combined technologies, and the technology was announced later that year.
OPEN TYPE FONTS
Adobe and Microsoft continued to develop and refine Open Type over the next decade. Then, in late 2005, OpenType began migrating to an open standard under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) within the MPEG group, which had previously (in 2003) adopted OpenType 1.4 by reference for MPEG-4.Adoption of the new standard reached formal approval in March 2007 as ISO Standard ISO/IEC 14496-22 (MPEG-4 Part 22) called Open Font Format. It is also sometimes referred to as "Open Font Format Specification" (OFFS). The standard is technically equivalent to Open Type 1.4 specification, with appropriate language changes for ISO. The second edition of the Open Font Format was published in 2009 and it is declared as "technically equivalent" to the "Open Type font format specification". It is a free, publicly available standard.
By 2001 hundreds of Open Type fonts were on the market. Adobe finished converting their entire font library to Open Type toward the end of 2002. As of early 2005, around 10,000 Open Type fonts had become available, with the Adobe library comprising about a third of the total.
By 2006, every major font foundry and many minor ones were developing fonts in Open Type format.
Open Type uses the general structure of a TrueType font, but it adds several smart font options that enhance the font's typographic and language support capabilities.
Basic Roman support
Open Type support may be divided into several categories. Virtually all applications and most modern operating systems have basic Roman support and work with Open Type fonts just as well as other, older formats. What is of particular interest apart from basic Roman support is: extended language support through Unicode, support for complex writing scripts such as Arabic and the Indic languages, and advanced typographic support for Latin script languages such as English.
Amongst Microsoft's operating systems, Open Type TT fonts (.TTF) are backward compatible and therefore supported by all Windows versions starting with Windows 3.1. Open Type PS fonts (.OTF) are supported in all Windows versions starting with Windows 2000; Adobe Type Manager is required to be installed on Windows 95/98/NT/Me for basic Roman support (only) of Open Type PS fonts.
Extended language support
Extended language support via Unicode for both Open Type and TrueType is present in most Windows applications (including Microsoft Office Publisher, most Adobe applications, and Microsoft Office 2003, though not Word 2002), Corel DRAW X3 and newer, and many Mac OS X applications, including Apple's own such as Text Edit, Pages and Keynote. It is also widely supported in free operating systems, such as GNU/Linux (e.g. in multiplatform applications like Abiword, Gnumeric, KOffice, Scribus, OpenOffice.org 3.2 and later versions etc.).
Open Type support for complex written scripts has so far mainly appeared in Microsoft applications in Microsoft Office, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher. Adobe InDesign provides extensive Open Type capability.
Advanced typographic Support
Advanced typographic support for Latin script languages first appeared in Adobe applications such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. QuarkXPress 6.5 and below (Quark, Inc.) were not Unicode compliant. However, in QuarkXPress 7, Quark offered support similar to Adobe's. Corel's CorelDRAW does not support Open Type typographic features, either.
No comments:
Post a Comment