11 Facts About OpenType

The name OpenType was chosen for the combined technologies, and the technology was announced later that year.

Since then, the Open Font Format and the OpenType specification have continued to be maintained in sync.

OpenType uses the general sfnt structure of a TrueType font, but it adds several smartfont options that enhance the font's typographic and language support capabilities.

Nevertheless, OpenType has been adopted much more widely than AAT or Graphite, despite AAT being the older technology.

From a font developer's perspective, OpenType is, for many common situations, easier to develop for than AAT or Graphite.

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The application supports key OpenType tables required for line layout, such as BASE, glyph definition, glyph positioning, and glyph substitution.

In free software environments such as Linux, OpenType rendering is provided by the FreeType project, included in free implementations of the X Window System such as X org.

OpenType features are created by using the tags in creating feature scripts that describe how characters are to be manipulated to make the desired feature.

Microsoft's implementation relies entirely on vector graphics: two new OpenType tables were added in Microsoft's implementation: the COLR table allows layered glyphs and the CPAL actually defines the colors for the layers.

The package consists of the glyph outline in TrueType or CFF form; standard OpenType tables declaring the glyph's metrics and behavior in composition; and metadata, extra information included for identifying the glyphlet, its ownership, and perhaps pronunciation or linguistic categorization.

In Unicode, these are encoded in a single code point and OpenType allows showing these language-specific glyphs using language tags and the locl feature.