Do i need pc truetype or opentype fonts

[Nicola McIntosh]

heres some info from google that might be of interest 😀

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/Abo … rview.mspx

http://www.dq.winsila.com/miscellaneous … rence.html

nik

[Lorraine Clinch]

Good question Liam!

Thanks for those links Nik, now I have the answer to Liams question!

Lorraine 😛

[David-Foster-]

Don’t forget, Microsoft gave us ‘Comic Sans’ 😮 one of the worst fonts ever!

[Liam Pattison]

Thanks for the links Nicola,
i think i’m going to use the truetype fonts for now after reading that unless anyone tells me otherwise

Thanks again

Liam

[Simon Strom]

The main difference that you might have to worry about for now is that a lot of older programs and ones that weren’t updated to support Open Type fonts obviously will have a problem using them. We still are using FreeHand MX here at work (we need the multi-pages) and it hasn’t been updated in years. This causes a problem with using Open Type fonts because FreeHand really doesn’t support them. That’s one consideration.

Basically Open Type is an extension of True Type. You can think of it kind of like True Type +. Open Type fonts generally contain many more characters than other font formats. They can have characters for multiple Non-Roman character languages and a lot of variations for ligatures. I believe that Adobe is moving towards (or maybe already has) selling only Open Type versions of their fonts.

So if you know that your program and OS will support OT fonts and the price is the same as a TT font, I would say maybe go for the OT font. You probably won’t really ever need the extra language support nor the ligatures, but it’s nice to have the option. Ligatures are making a come back somewhat slowly in typesetting though.

[Liam Pattison]

Thanks Simon
you have summed up what i was thinking there very well and explained it in a bit more depth.

I think you should get the fonts in both formats for the one price, you are going to be using them either way so what does it matter.

This would get them more sales because people like me who don’t really know what they’re doing would be more likely to buy if they were getting both formats.

Thanks

Liam

[Simon Strom]

You could always also get a program that can convert formats.

I can vouch for this company as having a really good software that I’ve used before, but it’s kind of pricey:
TransType
http://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype/

I don’t know about this company, but the price is much more affordable. I’ve never tried the program, so you might want to research it a little if that’s the route you want to go down.
CrossFont (Windows) or TransMac (Mac)
http://www.asy.com/

There might even be some free ones around. Probably do a Google search or look around on Sourceforge.

[Liam Pattison]

Thanks for that info Simon, i will look into those programs. Good to know that sort of thing is available

Liam

[Alan Drury]

I’ve used Transmac and Crossfont for a while but not the latest versions. They do work well providing the MAC end send both resource and data forks or you’ll get a file of 0 bites
Alan D