The future of OT/CFF

Mark Simonson

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?

James Puckett

What's the down side of only offering OT/TTF?

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.

Mark Simonson

Misinformation is a pretty stupid/depressing reason to keep supporting both formats.

James Puckett

I agree with you. But it is a reality we are stuck with until someone spends the money to convince font buyers that TrueType is all they need. And someone will have to get Adobe to stop pushing Postscript fonts. I don’t see either of those happening.

Mark Simonson

Kickstarter?

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

… until I realized many users required TTF.

What for?

… until someone spends the money to convince font buyers that TrueType is all they need.

Why this preference for TrueType?

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.

Georg Seifert

The biggest issue that I can see is that it is that even an auto hinted CFF font looks quite good in Indesign and a TTF font might look quite bad without some hinting work. So, if you are targeting designers you should ship CFF.
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).

James Puckett

What for?

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.

Mark Simonson

Those are all examples of what I meant about users requiring TTF.

Mark Simonson

Basically, my life would be simpler if I only supported and offered one format. If I had a choice, it would be CFF. But even supporting only TTF would be preferable to the current situation.

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.

Craig Eliason

When I went from only shipping CFF to shipping both CFF and TTF

When was that?

James Puckett

When I went from only shipping CFF to shipping both CFF and TTF, my sales went up noticeably.

Does that include retail sales or did offering TTF bring in a lot more specialty licenses?

Mark Simonson

It was about two years ago. There were a lot of variables, including what I think was a halo effect from Typekit, so it's hard to say for sure. I have had quite a few specialty license requests (like mobile apps) and they always seem to want TTF. Before I had TTF available across the board, I had to do TTF builds on request, sometimes without much notice or turn-around time. Now it's just like, "no problem, here you go."

Mark Simonson

Incidentally, I dropped the legacy Mac/PC/PS/TT on my older fonts and redid most of them as OTF/TTF at the same time I added TTF versions of my CFF fonts.

Jan Schmoeger

Oh my, I have most of mine as auto-hinted ttf (for Typekit). Never occurred to me to add them for sale at Myfonts/Fontspring … I could have been rich

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

@Mark_Simonson Do you do TT hinting as well? If yes, how do you do it? Fontlab?

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:

Mark Simonson

I'm not sure if or where I asked that, but interesting answer. I've heard this advice elsewhere, that no hinting is better than autohinting with TT fonts. What about setting alignment zones?

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James Puckett

…in 6 years or so it would completely replace TTF.

I guess this will depend on how soon everybody on Windows XP finally moves to Windows 7 with IE 9. Microsoft is keeping XP support going and those oughties PCs turned out to be remarkably durable, so this might take a while.

Eris Alar

For some reason I thought that TTF/OTF had the same character limits as the older TTF fonts, whereas CFF/OTF could have bigger character sets, is that not true?

James Puckett

…is that not true?

That is not true.

Ralf

… so they only want CFF fonts that end in .OTF

So the perfect solution for Mark would be to only offer TrueType-flavoured fonts and ship them once with the ttf suffix, once with the otf suffix. ;-) Yes, the specs allow this. It’s not a hack.

What's the down side of only offering OT/TTF?

Apart from the mentioned "educating part", I don't see much technical downsides.

Nick Shinn

It’s easier to draw in PostScript mode, or is it just my impression because I’m more familiar with that?

Mark Simonson

So the perfect solution for Mark would be to only offer TrueType-flavoured fonts and ship them once with the ttf suffix, once with the otf suffix. ;-)

That may be, but can you embed a CFF font with a .ttf suffix in a Word doc or convert it to EOT? Those are among the reasons that TTF is needed in most cases.

Ralf

No, a CFF font can't have an TTF extension, but a TrueType-flavoured OpenType font can either have a TTF extension (for backwards compatibility) or a OTF extension (to stress the fact that its actually OpenType and not plain old TrueType)

James Puckett

It’s easier to draw in PostScript mode, or is it just my impression because I’m more familiar with that?

I always found Postscript easier. That might be because nobody has designed a good interface for working with quadratic splines.

Georg Seifert

It is easier with postscript curves to get continuous curves. 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.

Thomas Phinney

Belatedly: “At ATYPI Dublin I remember Thomas Phinney talking about the great strides CFF/OTF was making in screen rendering, and in 6 years or so it would completely replace TTF. Tom, you around? Did I get that right?”

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

Deleted Account

I think this goes back to the format's documentation which says, "both Truetype or Postscript..." are allowed in OT. We have concluded that "both" needs to be an option in our storage format, as or is the forever option in our products.

Deleted Account

And: "That might be because nobody has designed a good interface for working with quadratic splines."
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."

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