Font Design

Archive for the ‘OpenType Fonts’ Category

This month’s free font download from Softmaker is Stone Handwriting. Each month, a new font is available as a free download from the same url: http://www.freefont.de/us/index.htm. There are a ton of handwriting fonts available online and a lot of them are unsuitable for many layouts because they are messy in appearance. This one has a nice, neat and clean feel. The characters have a uniform height, but does not appear to be draftsman-like, thus lending itself to informal usage without being messy.

This font comes in TrueType (TTF) and OpenType PostScript (OTF) formats. The PostScript variety makes it a good candidate for professional layouts output by printers and service bureaus.

The OpenType font format was developed to overcome problems with PostScript two-part files and the 256 character limitation with the PostScript font format. OpenType uses the Unicode encoding method which allows up to 65,536 characters to be defined in the font. For this reason, it is possible to include many alternate styles (like small caps, old style figures, swash characters, liigatures, etc.) in a single font.

Instead of using the old PostScript two-part file format, OpenType fonts have a single file that is cross-platform compatible. The same file can be used on Windows computers as well as Macntosh computers. The main advantage is that graphic designers, printers and other service providers can share the same font files. This will reduce the probability of text reflow – which is one of the most frequent problems that can occur when porting graphics files from Windows to Macintosh and vise-versa.

OpenType fonts exist in two “flavors” – TrueType and PostScript. TrueType font files will have a TTF file extension and PostScript font files will have an OTF file extension.