search

RoelN / Font-Falsehoods

Falsehoods programmers believe about fonts
99 stars 7 forks source link

OpenType fonts and TrueType fonts are different things #6

Open Pomax opened 7 years ago

Pomax commented 7 years ago

It's a little known fact that opentype is the font, and truetype is just one of four shape delivery methods... But it's always an excellent starting point into "so, opentype is a massive spec, and truetype/cff/svg/bitmap are just a small part of that".

RoelN commented 6 years ago

How could this best be phrased as a falsehood? "OpenType and TrueType are both specs"?

Pomax commented 6 years ago

That doesn't really disspell the myth though, For the long version I'd go with something like:

"OpenType is the font specification, and the name for the "type of font". TrueType, as well as SVG, CFF (often mistakenly referred to as Postscript), and embedded bitmaps are only glyph encoding specifications, reprenting an important but only partial aspect of modern fonts.

OpenType fonts contain a wealth of data in addition to simply outline vectors, so when talking about fonts: they're OpenType fonts. It is only when we need to talk about font internals, and we need to talk about the specific data structures and lookups used for glyph resolution that the designations TrueType, CFF, SVG, or embedded bitmaps come into play."

Or... something along those lines?

And then for the short version "Fonts are just "OpenType fonts". TrueType, SVG, CFF, and bitmaps are glyph encoding specifications used internally by OpenType fonts"?