Font files

• A font file is a electronic data file containing a set of glyph, characters, or symbols such as dingbats.
• The files can be accessed by the operating system and applications.

Types of font files

Bitmap

• Bitmap fonts consist of a matrix of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size.
• For each variant of the font, there is a complete set of glyph images, with each set containing an image for each character.
• For example if a font has three sizes and any combination of bold and italic then there must be 12 complete sets of images.

Advantages

• Extremely fast and simple to render.
• Easier to create than other kinds.
• Unscaled bitmap fonts always give exactly the same output when displayed on the same specification display.
• Best for very low quality displays where the fonts needs to be fine-tuned to display clearly.

Disadvantages

• Visual quality is poor when scaled or transformed.
• Require a separate font for each size.

Stroke based fonts

• A glyph outline is defined by the vertices of individual stroke paths and the corresponding stroke profiles.
• It reduces the number of vertices needed to define a glyph.
• It also allows scaling glyph in height or width without altering the stroke thickness.

Outline fonts

• Outline fonts or vector fonts are collections of vector images, consisting of lines and curves defining the boundary of glyph.
• Outline fonts are a set of lines and curves instead of pixels, so can be scaled without causing pixellation.

Type 1 and Type 3 fonts:

• Type 1 and Type 3 fonts were developed by Adobe for professional digital typesetting.
• Type 1 fonts are restricted to a subset of the PostScript language, and used Adobe's hinting system, which used to be very expensive.
• Type 3 allowed unrestricted use of the PostScript language, but didn't include any hint information, which could lead to visible rendering artifacts on low-resolution devices like computers screen.

True Type fonts:

• True Type fonts system originally developed by Apple Inc.
• It was intended to replace Type 1 fonts.
• It was described with quadratic Bezier curves.

Open Type fonts:

• Open type is a smart font system designed by Adobe and Microsoft.
• Open Type fonts contains outlines in either the True Type or Open Type format together with a wide range of metadata.

My notes