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Font Formats
Format: TTF (TrueType Format)
The TrueType format was created by Apple Computer in the late 1980s. Unlike the earlier raster formats, like FON, TTF uses vectors to store each glyph. This allows the font to be displayed or printed at any size
and still look just like it's supposed to. TTF also incorporates hinting. Hinting allows the font to look good even when drawn at the pixel level, such as on a monitor. Nearly every graphic and word processor
program since the early-1990s supports TTF.
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType
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Format: OTF (OpenType Format)
OpenType format was created by Microsoft when Apple refused to license their AAT format in the early 1990s. In 1994 Microsoft had begun work, and by 1996 Adobe joined in and began converting their entire font
library into OTF. Most professional fonts being created now are in OTF. OTF is primarily based on TTF, but it has several additions that make it superior like proper Unicode support, more glyphs per font file,
cross-platform support, and more efficient data storage, among others. Most graphic and word processor programs made after 1999 support OTF.
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType
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Format: FON (Font)
FON is a older font format used by Microsoft pre-Windows 95. Each font can utilize either raster glyphs or line art glyphs, but not both. Because FON format fonts have been obsolete since the early 1990s, few
modern graphic or word processor programs support them. MS Paint still supports the raster-based FON format, but not the line art FON format.
The raster format stores each glyph in a pixel bitmap. The benefit or raster glyphs is that they can be displayed much faster than vector glyphs and, when drawn at the expected point size, look exactly the same
as the artist's intention. Also, because they use a bitmap format, they can very easily and quickly be made to mimic videogame fonts from older videogames. However, the major downfall of raster glyphs is that they
cannot be resized as easily as vector glyphs. Because they store individual pixels instead of line art, raster images become very blocky looking at larger sizes as in the image below.
To help alleviate the resizing problem, multiple raster fonts can be stored in a single FON file at different point sizes. The Courier font shipped with Windows 3 contained three different sizes of the same font.
Each one was drawn slightly different. If you wanted a font at a different size than what the font could handle, it would have to be scaled by a program which wouldn't always yield desired results.
The line format only uses line art in a "connect-the-dots" fashion. Unlike TTF or OTF, it doesn't fill in hollow areas. This prevented the font from being able to support thick lines.
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© Copyright 2009: Dean Tersigni. All rights reserved.
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