Re: Font Technology Standards

[Bob_Hallissy]

Not sure exactly what you are looking for because "Font Technology" covers a broad spectrum, but a *simplified* picture might be something like the following:

First, we should distinguish bitmap font technologies from scalable font technologies ... I assume you are more interested in the latter.

For scalable fonts, there are a number of fundamentally different ways to describe the curves: Postscript outlines are based on bezier curves, TrueType outlines on quadratic curves, and I can't remember what Metafont is.

The next level is how you package the individual glyphs into a font:
        Postscript type1 fonts -- bundle up Postscript outlines
        TrueType fonts -- bundle up TrueType outlines
        OpenType fonts -- bundle up either TrueType or Postscript outlines (and bitmaps)
and there are others.

Next level is how you encode into the font the smarts for complex rendering. At least three technologies utilize extensions of the TrueType font:
        OpenType from Microsoft & Adobe
        GX and AAT from Apple
        SIL Graphite from SIL

(Note that the TrueType file structure is inherently extensible, and OpenType, GX/AAT and Graphite fonts are TrueType fonts with extra tables. Because of this people often interchange and blur the terms "TrueType" and "OpenType".)

As is common in this world, at each level the various options each have pros and cons.

Bob