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OpenType

What is OpenType?

OpenType® is the unification of the two most powerful and widely used font formats today, PostScript® and TrueType®, into a single font format. Developed by Adobe Systems® Inc. and Microsoft® Corporation, OpenType brings these two technologies together and extends them with new typographic and line layout capabilities. OpenType will be the new standard for high quality type in print and on the web. The capabilities which OpenType will provide to font developers, application developers and end-users are truly exciting.

The publishing community has long been looking forward to the day when someone can use a single font which will work in any environment. By combining Adobe's bitmap, metric and outline data with Microsoft's TrueType format, OpenType works on Windows®, Mac OS™, and most other operating systems.

Multilingual users have been looking for a way that documents could be seamlessly transmitted from one platform to another anywhere in the world and know that others can view and read it as intended. OpenType utilizes Unicode encoding. Unicode is an international character set standard which allows OpenType fonts to contain more than 65,000 glyphs - or character shapes - in each font, making non-Latin languages with large character sets such as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic more accessible to developers.

Font developers have been anticipating the time when the capabilities of both PostScript and TrueType could be realized in a single format. The OpenType Layout model provides a powerful architecture for supporting complex scripts and advanced typography. No longer confined to the 256-charcter limit, OpenType fonts offer the charcters that either were never available or were relegated to "special" fonts that had to be obtained separatly. The new OpenType Layout features can include alternate designs, ligatures, old style figures and small capitals.

The OpenType font format addresses the following goals:

• broader multi-platform support
• better support for international character sets
• better protection for font data
• smaller file sizes to make font distribution more efficient
• broader support for advanced typographic control

Major font foundries such as Adobe and Monotype Imaging Inc. fully support OpenType and are expanding their font libraries with OpenType fonts.

OpenType PostScript and OpenType TrueType

Even though all OpenType fonts are cross-platform compatible, they are still offered in two formats: OpenType PostScript (.otf) and OpenType TrueType (.ttf).

Like their earlier counterparts, OpenType PostScript fonts are typically best suited for publishing and prepress use, while OpenType TrueType fonts are ideal in situations where high screen quality is critical.

Compatibility of OpenType

For Macintosh users, OpenType PostScript fonts require users to have OS 8.6 or newer, while for Windows users, Windows 95 or later is required. OS X, Windows 2000 and Windows XP all provide native support for OpenType fonts. Operating systems that provide native support do not require the use of Adobe Type Manager or AdobePS printer driver.

OpenType and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Adobe and PostScript are trademarks of Adobe Systems. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.