Font Formats

INTRO TO MULTIMEDIA. MAT 103	Alejandra Jarabo
Multimedia Arts & Technologies. Santa Barbara City College	PREVIOUS page Typography 4

Font Formats. Printing Fonts

The use of digital fonts has changed dramatically in recent years with new font formats and new ways to use them.

The first fonts used in computers were designed to be installed and viewed on a desktop or laptop computer to may be get printed later. Those are called system fonts or desktop fonts.

Several desktop font formats have been used for print publishing and general personal computer use for the last 20 years. The major formats of this kind are:

PostScript
The first high quality fonts to be used in personal computers. Created by Adobe but adopted by Apple computers, made it possibble to scale type to any size while preserving smooth curves and sharp edges. MORE

TrueType
The most common format in use today. Created by Apple( to solve the problems of early bitmap fonts) but licensed later by Microsoft. Both companies made this font format the standard for their operative system fonts.
The technology uses one file -- a suitcase -- to contain all its output instructions for print and screen. They use simpler internal mathematics to describe their letter forms, relying on straight lines and less-advanced bezier curves. MORE

OpenType
Open standard, created by Adobe and Microsoft to include more sophisticated features.
Any OpenType font uses a single font file for all of its outline, metric, and bitmap data, making file management simpler.
It makes it possible to pack thousands of character variants or glyphs into a single typeface file. You can also use the same font file on Windows and MacOS Xand it includes typographic capabilities like true small caps, better support for non English glyphs or better support for ligatures. MORE, and MORE

When you install Adobe Creative Cloud applications that support printing, a range of Adobe open Type fonts get installed along withg the application.


Type formats in a PC

Open Type icon


Icons for different Font Formats		How OpenType if assimilating old formats

Type on the Web. Browser safe fonts versus Web fonts

Open type fonts are system fonts that are appropiate for print-projects but are not ideal for text on web pages.

When you install Adobe Creative Cloud applications that support printing, a range of Adobe open Type fonts get installed along withg the application.

Classic use of type on the web
For a very long time html text was redrawn on a browser with one of the system fonts intalled in the local computer of the web user.

Default system fonts
If you used a nice font available in your computer to design a page but that font was not available in the user's computer, the font would be replaced by one the user actually had installed.
This would drastically restrict the number of fonts that you could expect in any computer down to the default system fonts that, in the web context, will be called Browser safe fonts.
To make matters even worse, macs and PCs don't have the same default system fonts. To see a list of those fonts in macs and PCs click HERE

Family font property
As an attempt to have better control of how the text would be displayed on most computers (taking into account browsers and operative systems)an added feature was added in CSS that could assign a pre-defined Family font (group of similar system fonts) as a property of the text.
If a text had a certain family font assigned to it but the first font was not supported by the user's browser or operative system, the browser would try the next font in the group.
See MORE about this CSS feature.