Engineered by Microsoft and Adobe, OpenType fonts have unparalleled typographic power for designers working heavily with type.
Before OpenType, fonts came in two formats: PostScript (Adobe) and TrueType (Microsoft). PostScript fonts were preferred by graphic designers, while TrueType was used widely in offices. Since these font formats were created and maintained by two different manufacturers, using fonts with multiple language was not easily and clearly supported and the fonts behaved differently on Macs and PCs.
These fonts, commonly known as legacy fonts, have become a thing of the past since Microsoft and Adobe joined forces in 1997 to create a universal font format designed to overcome the challenges the previous font formats faced.
Many designers know that a third font format exists, but may not know the key benefits to choosing OpenType over legacy fonts.
The main benefits of OpenType fonts are:
- Cross-Platform Compatibility — every time
Difficulty getting fonts to work the same way when switching between Macs and PCs is a thing of the past with OpenType. These fonts are based on Unicode encoding that is guaranteed to behave the same way whether working with Macs or PCs.
- Simple Font Management
OpenType fonts only contain one file. Instead of having different files for italics or special characters, OpenType contains every type of variation a designer would need for a project within one file can be installed on any computer.
- Easy Use of Extra Characters
Legacy font sets do not allow for more that 256 characters or glyphs to be encoded within one font file, says Thomas Phinney, Adobe's product manager, in his blog The Phinney-us Blog. With OpenType, a designer can access up to 65,000 characters depending on how many characters have been programed into the font by the fontographer. Since each variation of the character is fundamentally based on the original character, spell check never gets hung up on nonsense words and continues to run smoothly even after the designer has altered the text.
- Wide-Ranging Language Support
Since OpenType has the ability to handle very large character sets, the support for different languages is exhaustive. Any language can be typeset from a single keyboard, even if the software for that keyboard does not support it.
- Advanced Typographic Features
Ligatures or fractions can be inserted automatically instead of manually with OpenType fonts. Many programs, such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, have OpenType palettes where special characters are only a click away.
Learning More About OpenType
For more information, check out Adobe's OpenType Web site.
