I'm starting to wonder if it's worth shipping fonts in OT/CFF instead of or in addition to OT/TTF. OT/CFF is easier for me as a developer, and makes smaller font files, but TTF has more universal support. For a while, I only offered my newer fonts as OT/CFF, until I realized many users required TTF.
Making both formats means more work for me. From the customer's point of view, it makes things more complicated, too. What's the down side of only offering OT/TTF?
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Graphic designers and printers are generally ignorant of font technology. Printers hate TrueType because low-end font design tools only export TrueType, and lots of shitty free TrueType fonts have crashed their RIPs or ruined jobs over the years. Designers have learned this from printers and live by it. Additionally, many designers think TrueType is really just a format for Mac or Windows—the opposite of whatever platform they use. Most users have no idea that there are CFF and TT flavored OpenType fonts, so they only want CFF fonts that end in .OTF. These designers and printers teach design and print production at art and trade schools, so every year thousands of young designers graduate with the assumption that TrueType fonts are evil. Some professional type designers have reinforced this by only distributing OT/CFF. And now designers all hearing that TrueType fonts are for that web hinting, further convincing them to never use a TrueType font in print. This mess is not going to get fixed without throwing substantial amounts of money at educating designers worldwide.
Personally, I go the opposite way, and my experience is that you can pretty much do without TT except for EOT, which you ‘only’ (I know I know) need for IE up to version 8. But it's a matter of time until that withers away.
There are some Office users that need TTF because Office can embed them in the documents. This does not work with OTFs (at least this was a problem the last time I checked in Office 2007).
Crappy custom software that only works with TrueType is out there. TrueType also seems to be the format used in many embedded computing systems and video games.
Part of this is a marketing issue. When I went from only shipping CFF to shipping both CFF and TTF, my sales went up noticeably. By the same token, dropping CFF might also have a negative impact.
If I'm stuck supporting both, I can live with that. It just would be nice if it were otherwise.
It's not hard to imagine CFF getting marginalized over time. I don't see the same happening to TTF.
Except for the hinting, I automated TTF creation (as medium format for creating those pesky EOTs). No TT hinting at all still looks better than (unpredictable) TT autohinting, at least in web browsers. We got the weirdest distortions, while the unhinted EOTs looked just fine:
Well, half right. ClearType in DirectWrite (and WPF) does a pretty fabulous job with CFF/OTF. In that environment, the additional benefit of hand-hinted TrueType is dramatically reduced, and there is no benefit at all from autohinted TrueType, IMO. Same for Adobe's rendering in Acrobat.
On Mac OS and iOS, there is generally no meaningful difference between TTF and OTF rendering.
At larger sizes, OT-CFF provides better rendering (less jaggies) under GDI ClearType. It also tends to have significantly smaller fonts.
That being said, lots of people still care about other environments (and smaller sizes under GDI ClearType), and it remains to be seen how the new so-called ClearType in Windows 8 does with TTF vs OT-CFF. (I don't consider it “real” ClearType because it does not use color sub-pixels. It is just a different gray-scale anti-aliasing approach.)
So overall, I don't see OT-CFF going away any time soon. it has a variety of advantages (including using the outline format most type designers want to draw in, at least vs TT).
Cheers,
T
And: "You need less points to be at the right place and in TTF, you would need to add/remove points all the time to get your curve as you like it."
twitpic.com/bdocz8