The macOS and Windows operating systems support multiple font formats. FontAgent® Server supports each of these formats, and tests and optimizes your fonts to ensure that they render faithfully and efficiently.
Mac TrueType Fonts
After its introduction by Apple and Microsoft in 1991, TrueType rapidly became a popular cross-platform font format because it stores all information for a font in a single file. There was some initial resistance to TrueType adoption due to the use of old imaging devices that depended on PostScript Type 1 fonts. TrueType use grew rapidly when Apple licensed it to Microsoft for use in Windows, and then added support for Windows TrueType to give Mac users access to large libraries of inexpensive Windows ttf fonts.
One of the advantages of TrueType fonts has been the ability of Microsoft Office applications to embed them in documents and presentations. Since the introduction of OpenType in 2000, TrueType has been steadily losing ground to the more modern OpenType format in sales and popularity. But today, TrueType fonts still represent an overwhelming percentage of fonts in use worldwide.
After its introduction by Apple and Microsoft in 1991, TrueType rapidly became a popular cross-platform font format because it stores all information for a font in a single file. There was some initial resistance to TrueType adoption due to the use of old imaging devices that depended on PostScript Type 1 fonts. But after a few years, TrueType became the leading font format throughout the 1990s. However, since the introduction of OpenType in 2000, TrueType has been steadily losing ground to the more modern OpenType format in sales and popularity. Today, TrueType fonts still represent an overwhelming percentage of fonts in use worldwide.
Windows TrueType
Apple invented the TrueType font file format, but its growth in popularity was because Apple licensed TrueType to Microsoft for its use in Windows. Apple included support for Windows TrueType in Mac OS X and macOS, giving Mac users instant access to large libraries of inexpensive Windows ttf-format fonts. One of the advantages of TrueType format fonts has been the ability of Microsoft Office applications to embed them in documents and presentations.
TrueType Collections
TrueType Collections are .ttc files that contain more than one font. The collections usually contain multiple styles in a font family and have been distributed as part of Windows operating system releases. Windows and Mac computers both recognize modern TrueType Collections.
OpenType Fonts
Introduced in 2000, the OpenType font format was jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe. It can be used on Mac and Windows systems, providing a great deal of flexibility for enterprises, designers, service bureaus and printers. In addition, OpenType is not a font outline format, but a standard for encapsulating font-file components into a unified, portable file format so most OpenType files contain TrueType or PostScript outlines for printing. OpenType is the most modern font-file format for desktops. It can support more than 65,000 character glyphs in one file, so it can support extended character sets, dingbats, ligatures, ordinals, old-style, symbols and worldwide languages.
PostScript Type 1 Fonts
Support for PostScript Type 1 fonts is spotty at best and using them is not recommended. PostScript Type 1 fonts were introduced by Adobe in 1984, but stopped developing them in 1999. A few years later, Adobe stopped selling Type 1 fonts altogether. Type 1 fonts are comprised of an outline font used on printing devices, and a series of bitmap fonts used for on-screen display. Mac operating systems require you to keep a font’s outline and bitmap files in the same folder.
Despite being a time-tested technology, Type 1 fonts have a number of important shortcomings. They do not support more than 256 glyphs in a single font, nor Unicode encoding. They don’t work in a portable manner across Mac, Windows and Unix platforms. And they do not have advanced typography extensions to support worldwide languages.
dfont Fonts
The dfont format is an old font format used by legacy Mac OS X system fonts. These fonts are similar to Mac TrueType, but store their information in the data fork instead of the resource fork of the file system. In general, you should avoid using dfonts in your projects and look for OpenType or TrueType alternatives.