How To Opentype Fonts

OpenType is a hybrid font format created by Adobe and Microsoft. It reconciles
the differences in the PostScript and TrueType formats, allowing them to exist
together in a single file. OpenType fonts are also written in a file format that
allows the same font file to be used on either a Macintosh or a Windows pc.
Crudely put, an OpenType font is a TrueType font with a “pocket” for Post-
Script data. An OpenType font can contain TrueType font data, PostScript font
data, or (theoretically) both. Thus it has the potential to combine the best of
both formats in a transparent way. The operating system of your computer
will sort out the data in an OpenType font and use what’s appropriate for it.
A
problem with OpenType fonts, as with the TrueType fonts that preceded them,
is that from the outside there’s no way to know what’s inside. The original
generation of PostScript fonts generally contained a standard character set with
standard features. The TrueType format and, to an even greater extent, the
OpenType format offer a wide range of optional features that may or may not
be built into every font, although the core character set used in the original
PostScript fonts has generally been retained. An OpenType font can contain
anywhere from a handful of characters to more than 65,000. There’s no way of
knowing what a particular font contains or what it can do unless the features
of the font are documented in some way.

OpenType fonts also enable a variety of so-called layout features, which give
a typesetting program the ability to automatically substitute one character for
another. Using an appropriate OpenType font, for example, a program can
automatically convert the keystroke sequence 1/2 into a proper fraction: ½.
Layout features are discussed in detail on pages 62–64.

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