11 Facts About TrueType fonts

Primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes.

TrueType fonts was known during its development stage, first by the codename "Bass" and later on by the codename "Royal".

Meanwhile, in exchange for TrueType fonts, Apple got a license for TrueImage, a PostScript-compatible page-description language owned by Microsoft that Apple could use in laser printing.

Part of Adobe's response to learning that TrueType was being developed was to create the Adobe Type Manager software to scale Type 1 fonts for anti-aliased output on-screen.

Much of the technology in TrueType fonts GX, including variations and substitution, lives on as AAT in macOS.

Related searches

In partnership with their contractors, Monotype Imaging, Microsoft put a lot of effort into creating a set of high quality TrueType fonts that were compatible with the core fonts being bundled with PostScript equipment at the time.

Microsoft and Monotype technicians used TrueType's hinting technology to ensure that these fonts did not suffer from the problem of illegibility at low resolutions, which had previously forced the use of bitmapped fonts for screen display.

Until May 2010, there were potential patent infringements in FreeType 1 because parts of the TrueType fonts hinting virtual machine were patented by Apple, a fact not mentioned in the TrueType fonts standards.

Outlines of the characters in TrueType fonts are made of straight line segments and quadratic Bezier curves.

TrueType fonts systems include a virtual machine that executes programs inside the font, processing the "hints" of the glyphs, in TrueType fonts called “instructions”.

Many TrueType fonts therefore have only rudimentary instructions, or have them automatically applied by the font editor, with results of various quality.