Chapter 7. OpenType: The New Frontier in Font Technology

BACK IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY when PostScript fonts battled it out with TrueType fonts in what the trade press dubbed “font wars,” managing fonts was a thorn in the side of every graphic designer. With PostScript fonts you had to keep track of the two parts of your font: a screen font, which contained the information about the font’s spacing characteristics and kerning pairs, and a printer or outline font, which contained the data about each character shape. It was this second part that was downloaded to your PostScript printer so it could print the characters. TrueType fonts were simpler in that there was only one part to them, but too often caused problems when printing to a PostScript ...

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