After the Adobe/CFF/FreeType deal, would you still ship TTFs?

yanone
yanone Posts: 130
in Technique and Theory
After the discussion of James’ question turned much towards hinting details, I’ll re-ask the question in a more practical and also personal way:

After Adobe’s ace move to offer its CFF rasterizer to FreeType and with it the expectation that this rasterizer gets implemented in many devices and software in the near future, would you still care to ship TTFs altogether for a general purpose print/web typeface at this point?

As far as I understand, IE8 is the last major software to not support CFF-based web fonts. Its market share is currently at 5.5% according to this chart.

5.5% doesn’t qualify as negligible just yet, but that depends also on attitude. Are there any additional major software out there that I forgot that still require TTF?

Comments

  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,995
    There’s a lot more to this than just Freetype getting a better rasterizer. Windows XP has to be dead and buried. Microsoft has to not give users an option to disable anti-aliased web fonts. Phone/Tablet makers have to implement new Android releases with the new Freetype rasterizer enabled. Browser makers have to not do dumb shit that undermines CFF rasterization. Until all of that happens, people have to keep shipping TTF web fonts.
  • vernon adams
    vernon adams Posts: 82
    re android, which is i guess the biggest market % use of freetype. Android tends to ship on devices with higher res screens, and that tends to close any render quality gap between cff and ttf anyway. TTFs with no instructions render perfectly fine on Android devices (often better than instructed ttfs, especially as the screen resolution increases). I'm curious to test the new CFF engine on android, and see what visual improvements there can be. On freetype based desktop OS's (e.g. the Linux's) the new CFF render engine does seem to improve screen type appearance using OTFs compared to TTFs. So ironically the biggest visual winner for the time being seems to be the Free Software desktops. Might be interesting how the new CFF engine might pan out for a device like Valve's promised games console, that presumably will use freetype. Could be a nice little shot in the arm for that project :)
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,890
    What James said.

    Also, the W3Schools stats are only for visitors to that site; hardly a representative sample. By way of contrast, these stats show IE 8 and earlier totaling some 30% of the market: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 (not saying those are representative either, btw)

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