The rough and the smooth: bitmap and vector fonts

OpenType - all the glyphs you ever wanted
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

click for an animation

click for a closer view
Since it's a new technology, the new features of OpenType fonts are only accessible within programmes that are written to support them - the only ones I have seen mentioned are InDesign and Acrobat 5 - 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 ...

There is for me one reservation in all this, that OpenType is developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft: and although it's supported as a native format in the Mac OS X, it's remarkable that the help file for Apple's operative system 9.2.2, dated May 2001, gives no references at all to the topic.

Yet, 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 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.

For anyone who wants to add OpenType features to TrueType fonts, the group offers a free Visual OpenType Layout Tool: you can read quite a bit about it, and follow some tutorials, starting here; and there's an overview of the user interface here; but to try it out you have to join the users community. A news item from December 2001 mentions over 2000 members, both type designers and others interested.

Actually there's no mention of Mac in the pages I saw: it seems a bit odd, since Microsoft employs the largest group of Mac programmers outside of Apple; but maybe it's too specialised for them to develop for both platforms. Certainly something I'll be taking a closer look at soon ...

A very friendly, and non-pushy page with links, news & contacts: here

System Requirements

  • PC using a Pentium
  • Windows95> + Adobe Type Manager Light 4.1 or Windows 2000>