I have a hard time with TTF because it's quadratic so I've totally skipped it for now and stuck with OTF only. I have tried the auto conversion from OTF to TTF, aside from it generating a ton of nodes, I figured the only way for it to look right was to manually clean it up to have fewer nodes, another reason why I skipped a TTF version. I'm not sure if fewer nodes is better for TTF or if an autoconversion is good enough, but the whole quadratic thing just made it difficult since I wasn't used to it. So are there any use cases where TTF is an absolute must that an OTF won't suffice or can I stick to just an OTF? Only thing I can think of is hinting but aside from hinting anything else?
Cheers!
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You can get much better screen rendering with hinted TrueType on windows. Mac and mobile (iOS and Android) are fine with OT.
@Terminal Design just artsy type I guess, display?
@Ray Larabie right, that makes sense.
@Cory Maylett Ah yeah more choices the better I guess.
I think he means artsy people.
cubic to quadratic requires some hackery (all quadratics are cubics, but not all cubics are quadratics).
There are some intrinsic differences between the two kinds of font technologies (and rendering requirements), mainly in those two areas. It is not convenient for font designers to make two versions, but that's a reality to use either technology to the full...
(Unless you’re specifically working on specialized screen fonts, perhaps.)
Sometimes when I make fonts with small rounded corners, I go in quadratic (TT) mode and manually set each corner to a single curve point. Normally, it's not a problem but when corners are only 4-10 units in size, they can get messed up when converting to PS curves and back. When making obliques, sometimes I'll slant as TT curves and convert back to PS curves. When I'm dealing with small rounded corners, there's no such thing as lossless. I just try to do it in a way that causes the least amount of conversion damage.
This is one thing you need to know about PS to TT conversions that you need points at inflections.
Maybe not entirely Bill's fault - Apple was in it as well, and Adobe could be blamed for withholding the rendering of postscript in the type manager, and not license it cheaply also...
At first, it wasn't that great, but over the years it has gotten better and better. And now with retina screens, it rivals the printed page in terms of sharpness.
I really prefer the smart rasterizer strategy, not only because it means less work for me, but also because it eliminates a huge bottleneck. If a new screen technology comes along, with the dumb rasterizer strategy, potentially all existing fonts must be updated since they have been individually optimized to work with the older screen technology. With a smart rasterizer, existing fonts should work fine as is.
Obviously there are trade offs, especially on low to medium res screens. But I think as screens get better and better, the dumb rasterizer strategy seems to make less and less sense.
Agreed. Microsoft’s text rendering strategies seem to revolve around the fonts that ship with the OS and Office. And to make matters worse Microsoft enabled software developers live in their own typographic universes, altering the behavior of Directwrite, so fonts instructed for Windows end up looking different in individual applications.