


I will add that the file extension doesn't necessarily tell you everything about the font. manual hinting is better than no hinting or autohinting.Īlso make fonts and while we as a species (type designers) love to get into pedantic long arguments about everything, this is a really good ELI5 and I don't see any point in putting finer points on things.assuming OTF is CFF-OTF/Type 1 outlines, even though OTF is a wrapper around CFF or TTF outlines.So please use your allowance to buy fonts and don't steal. Last thing, kids: fonts take a lot of work to make and a lot of people work very hard to drawn new and interesting fonts. And a lot of architects need to use TrueType fonts in their programs. Web designers usually use fonts that start out as TrueType fonts. Graphic designers who work in print usually use OpenType fonts. When you're working in a job that uses a lot of fonts you might need to use one format or the other. Most people can't see these little differences, so you can use either OpenType or TrueType fonts. otf extension, and OpenType fonts can only have a. PostScript has some simple rules and mostly lets the computer decide how it should look. TrueType has lots of rules about how it should look, and because of this, a hinted font will usually look better on a computer screen. Hinting is special rules that tell the computer how to show the font on a computer screen. The other difference is how each font uses "hinting". You can't see the difference when looking at a font, but it's something a type designer has to think about when drawing the letters. OpenType fonts use Postscript Outlines which is a much easier way for designers to draw fonts. TrueType fonts are drawn using Quadratic Outlines, which is a very formal way of drawing letters. There are two things that make them different: The CSS at-rule allows authors to specify online fonts to display text on their web pages.TrueType and OpenType fonts are mostly the same thing.
