There's
so much hype written all the time about what's
new and what's going to change the whole face
of whatever it is you're doing, never mind whether
you want those changes or not: but actually
the new (from 1996, but getting under way from
2000) technology called OpenType looks something
really rather exciting, not just for specialists
at the cutting edge , but giving possibilities
that ordinary people can really have felt the
need of, and backwards-compatible so that no-one
who doesn't want to jump on that particular
band-wagon will be at a disadvantage.
An
OpenType typeface can incorporate all glyphs
(non-standard characters) into a single font
- expert, alternate, swash, fractions, non-Latin
forms etc. - and give features which TrueType
can't offer and which are needed for some
script systems, such as Arabic and many Indic
varieties.
OpenType
features include
- ligatures (pairs
of letters joined up, like 'fi', 'ff', 'Th')
- small capitals
- oldstyle figures
- accented letters
- superscript ordinals
(1st, 2nd)
- dingbats, ornaments
& border elements
- advanced justification
- optical margin
alignment
- hanging punctuation
- the very large numbers of characters that Asian fonts demand
Since it's still a relatively
a new technology, not all features of OpenType fonts are accessible in
all programmes - InDesign has the most complete set, perhaps - and it
seems that so far even these programmes have implemented only a few of
the many features which are possible, so we can expect quite some development
here in coming years.
There
are no losers here: in other programmes OpenType
fonts still show up, and work just like ordinary
fonts. OpenType is a hybrid font-format, a
superset of both TrueType and PostScript font
data; but you need to remember that they are
a different breed, and that the sophisticated
functions which work in 'OpenType savvy' programmes
won't transfer to other programmes: for instance,
the specimen book for Adobe Garamond Pro looks
really beautiful, but when I tried copying
text from the PDF version and pasting it into
a text- or HTML-editor, the ligatures were
replaced by bullets, and it was a question
of manually replacing the missing characters.
Since
these are 'pro' fonts, the roman, italic,
bold and bold-italic forms are only available
as separate fonts - in my tests, at least,
if I have only the Roman version installed
and apply the 'italic' style in a word processor,
as I would with a TrueType font, the text
becomes invisible, although the cursor shows
that it's still there, editable, and visible
again when you select a different font ...
You
get three OpenType fonts with InDesign, which
is just as well, because if you want to buy
more, Adobe Garamond, for example, will set
you back $170 per type-face, i.e. set of six
fonts, plain, italic, semibold, semibold italic,
bold and bold-italic. Or, if you're making
up a wish list for Christmas, you get 175
of them, together with 2,750 PostScript fonts,
in Adobe's FontFolio 9 for only $9,000. What
different worlds we all live in ...
Wikipedia:
Adobe:
Whatever one's opinion
of the modus vivendi of the parent company, it has always struck
me very strongly that the typography group at Microsoft is the one unit
which really is working for a better world for everyone, on the basis
of an enormous body of knowledge, both deep and wide, and a remarkable
facility to communicate it in understandable chunks:
"Our goal is to make
text highly legible, in any language on
any device." (
Typography group web-site)
And I wonder if you
can read this anywhere else on a Microsoft page:
"our method of implementing
these features is not the only way of going
about the job" (
OpenType/InDesign
tutorial)
They
give an excellent overview of the power and
flexibility of OpenType
here.