I've been reading up a bit on fonts recently, so I thought I'd put down what I've learned, along with some links I've found useful.
Contents
History
Formats
Finding What You Want
The Future
Links
A long time ago books were expensive. Teams of monks used to spend hours every day writing out pages with great amount of labour. Then some bloke invented the printing press. Now all the work was in carving out little letters on blocks of metal. These blocks could be jammed together, covered in ink and pressed onto a piece of paper to make a page of a book. What was good was that lots of copies could be made from the one page template, and once enough had been made, the letters could be taken off and reused for another template.
The people who carved these sets of letters were very skilled, and developed their own unique styles and shapes, making sets of letters that followed a theme. These sets developed into what we now call fonts.
Computers came along, and things got a bit rough for a while. The computers were limited in power, and text was displayed on screen in 8x8 blocks of pixels. Even worse than this, it was often printed in these 8x8 blocks. After a bit of time, though, computers became more powerful, and new technologies developed to describe fonts. Instead of bitmap images, fonts are now represented as outlines made up of curves, forming the shape of the characters. The advantage of this is that the character shapes can be rendered to different resolutions, so the same font can be used to display characters on screen (about 96 dots per inch) and very smoothly on a laser printer (600 dots per inch is typical).
Because of the ease of producing fonts on computer, and the font creation tools available, there are now thousands of fonts available. Quality varies, depending on the amount of time and skill spent in production, but the choice is huge.
There are still a variety of bitmap fonts available on computers, but there are two main types of outline font. Adobe started the ball rolling with Postscript Type 1. Then Apple came out with TrueType. TrueType can be found on Windows and Mac machines, while Postscript fonts can be used on Windows, Unix and most other operating systems. There is also a postscript type 3 format, which isn't used very much, and other minor formats, but the major players are True Type and Postscript Type 1.
There are some minor differences in the two main formats. Both describe characters, or glyphs, as a series of curves, but Postscript uses third order curves, whereas True Type uses quadratic curves. True Type fonts include a lot of information on hinting, the process by which the rasteriser decides how to draw the fonts on screen and maintain a reasonably clean look. Postscript has less hinting information, relying instead on the rasteriser to do all the work.
True Type fonts come in a single file, usually something.ttf. There are Mac and PC versions of True Type files, but these are essentially the same. Postscript is a bit different: a postscript font will be contained in several files. A pfb (binary) or pfa(ascii) file describes the outlines for the font itself. A pfm (binary) or afm(ascii) file describes the font metrics, such as character sizes, kerning pairs and so on. Mac files may have a bmap file, which is a bitmap version of the font, and character sizes can be obtained from this. All these different formats mean that often a converter program is needed to convert from the supplied format to what your computer requires. The Crossfont shareware program listed below is good for this.
There are essentially two types of font, as far as characters are concerned. There are text fonts, which, however weird, are generally recognisable as text characters. Then there are dingbat fonts. These are pictures, done in outlines so they take up little space and scale well.
There are thousands of fonts available, each different in style and use. Your needs will define what type of font you want. If you're writing a technical document, you'll want quite a formal font (not Comic Sans Serif, please!) If you're making a banner, you'll need a bold font. If you're making an artistic web page, you'll probably want a stylish font.
There are many fonts available free, from web pages, and magazine cover disks. These are great for casual work, but are often of fairly poor quality, and provide only a subset of the character set. The big type foundries (Adobe, Bitstream, etc) produce professional quality fonts, complete and consistent, but at a cost. It's all down to your needs, your budget and how much you're going to use the font you get.
The two big format companies, Adobe and Microsoft, have got together to define a common standard, known as OpenType. This is an extension to True Type, which can include Postscript format outlines. Hopefully, this will result in a single font format, which all platforms can use.
Parent Document: Technical Investigations
Author: David Meiklejohn
Web Page: here
Last Updated: 23/03/2000
Review Date: 01/10/2000