How To Truetype Fonts

For a few years in the late 1980s, the typesetting world had in PostScript a
single, standard font format for the first time in its history. It wasn’t to last. For
a combination of primarily commercial but also technological reasons, Apple
Computer and Microsoft collaborated to create a new font format: TrueType.
The new format enabled both companies to build outline font-imaging capabilities
into their respective operating systems without being beholden to Adobe.
TrueType introduced many improvements over the PostScript format.

The most prominently touted was its hinting, instructions added to the font
that tell the character outlines how to reshape themselves at low and medium
resolutions in order to create character images of maximum clarity. (For more
on hinting, see “Imaging PostScript Fonts” in .) Because of the high
quality of these hints, TrueType fonts were and still are typically delivered
without any hand-drawn, bitmapped screen fonts. Screen type generated from
the font’s outlines is generally quite legible even in small point sizes.
TrueType also allowed for larger character sets. The PostScript font format
had used a numbering system to identify the characters in its fonts based on a
single byte of computer data, yielding a maximum of 256 distinct id numbers.
(Fonts of this kind are still referred to as single-byte fonts.) TrueType introduced
a two-byte numbering system, which allowed much larger sets by
creating over 65,000 unique id numbers.

This made plenty of room for alternate forms of characters as well as allowing
languages that rely on huge character sets (such as Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean) to be supported by a single font. TrueType fonts are still included as
a part of major operating systems, but most independent digital font foundries
have shifted to OpenType because it allows a single font file to work under
multiple operating systems. TrueType fonts are still platform specific, and a
TrueType font created for use on a Mac will not work on a Windows pc, and
vice versa. TrueType fonts use a different technology than PostScript fonts do
for describing the outline shapes of characters, but any system that can image
type from PostScript fonts can also image type from TrueType fonts.


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