In the Windows "Fonts" directory, different fonts have different icons. An "A" is for a non-TrueType font file. A blue "TT" is for a TrueType font. A green "TT" is for a "TrueType collection font file". An "O" is for an OpenType font.
Bitmapped fonts are fonts which are drawn at a specific size. They do not scale well.
TrueType is a technology for scalable digital fonts. The outlines of the glyphs are described. They can then be drawn ("rasterized") at any size. TrueType also makes use of a technique called "hinting" which describes how to modify the shape of a character for proper rasterizing at small sizes. The TrueType font technology consists of two components: the TrueType fonts themselves and the TrueType rasterizer, a piece of software which is usually built-in to the operating system. The TrueType standard was originally developed by Apple Computer for use in their MacOS operating system. It was later licensed by Microsoft for use in their Windows operating system.
A TrueType Collection file is one or more TrueType fonts combined into one file.
The OpenType font format is an extension of the TrueType font format, adding support for PostScript font data. The OpenType font format was developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe.
OpenType is a new standard for digital type fonts, developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft. OpenType supersedes Microsoft's TrueType Open extensions to the TrueType format. OpenType fonts can contain either PostScript or TrueType outlines in a common wrapper. An OpenType font is a single file, which can be used on both Macintosh and Windows platforms without conversion. OpenType fonts have many advantages over previous font formats because they contain more glyphs, support more languages (OpenType uses the Unicode standard for character encoding,) and support rich typographic features such as small caps, old style figures, and ligatures — all in a single font.
Beginning with Adobe InDesign® and Adobe Photoshop® 6.0, applications have begun to support OpenType layout features. OpenType layout allows you to access features such as old style figures or true small caps by simply applying formatting to text. In most applications that do not actively support such features, OpenType fonts work just like other fonts, although the OpenType layout features are not accessible.
OpenType with PostScript outlines is supported by the latest versions of Adobe Type Manager, and is natively supported in Windows 2000. Apple has also announced its intent to support OpenType, and supplies Japanese system fonts for Mac OS X in OpenType form with PostScript outlines.
Type 1 is another standard for scalable digital fonts. It was first developed by Adobe Systems for use in PostScript printers.
The PostScript programming language was originally developed by Adobe Systems to communicate complex graphic printing instructions to digital printers. It is now built into many laser printers for high-quality rendering of both raster and vector graphics. An important feature of the PostScript language is that it is device independent. This means that it produces good-looking images regardless of the resolution or colour rendering method of the output device, and it takes full advantage of the capabilities built into the device.
ClearType is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper.
ClearType works by accessing the individual vertical color stripe elements in every pixel of an LCD screen. Before ClearType, the smallest level of detail that a computer could display was a single pixel, but with ClearType running on an LCD monitor, we can now display features of text as small as a fraction of a pixel in width. The extra resolution increases the sharpness of the tiny details in text display, making it much easier to read over long durations.
By default, ClearType is turned off in Windows XP. See Microsoft's instructions for how to turn it on. There is also a utility for
In Windows, the default shell font is referred to as MS Shell Dlg. This maps to a font name. The specific font is derived from "Language for non-Unicode programs" on the Advanced tab of the regional settings. See Microsoft KB article 282187 for information on how to change it. It can also be changed directly by changing the registry setting for "MS Shell Dlg". A system restart is required for the change to take effect.
There is a second default shell font, MS Shell Dlg 2, in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Well-written Windows software specifies the use of MS Shell Dlg or MS Shell Dlg 2 for the font.
If the language is set to UK English, MS Shell Dlg is Microsoft Sans Serif and MS Shell Dlg 2 is Tahoma.
If the required glyph is not available in the font, Windows has 2 methods for substituting one from another font - font fallback and font linking.
A Microsoft article about fonts and globalization - information about OpenType fonts, font fallback and font linking.
Download the Windows font properties extension (v2.1) to get a lot more information from the font "properties" dialogs. Of interest to me are the version on the Version tab, the number of glyphs on the Features tab and the font encoding type and supported Unicode ranges on the CharSet/Unicode tab.
Font information taken from http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/:
The fonts supplied as part of Windows include: Microsoft Sans Serif, Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma, Lucida Sans Unicode
The fonts supplied as part of Microsoft Office for Windows include: Arial Unicode MS
I don't know much about Mac and Unix/Linux fonts. There is some information here: Unicode Consortium and Alan Wood.
Fonts in Mac OS X Panther (10.3)
Below are the supported ranges in certain important Windows fonts. Different versions of Microsoft Sans Serif are shown because of its importance as MS Shell Dlg on UK systems. For the other fonts, I used the oldest system I had easy access to in order to encourage backwards compatibility.
| Range | Microsoft Sans Serif v. xx (a Windows 98 system) |
Microsoft Sans Serif v. 1.10 (a Windows 2000 system) |
Microsoft Sans Serif v. 1.41 (a Windows XP system) |
Times New Roman v. xx (a Windows 98 system) |
Arial v. xx (a Windows 98 system) |
Tahoma v. xx (a Windows 98 system) |
Lucida Sans Unicode v. xx (a Windows 98 system) |
Arial Unicode MS v. xx (an Office 2000 installation) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Latin | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Latin-1 Supplement | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Latin Extended-A | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Latin Extended-B | Yes | |||||||
| IPA Extensions | Yes | |||||||
| Spacing Modifier Letters | ||||||||
| Combining Diacritical Marks | Yes | |||||||
| Greek and Coptic | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Cyrillic | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Hebrew | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Arabic | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Thai | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Latin Extended Additional | Yes | |||||||
| Greek Extended | Yes | |||||||
| General Punctuation | ||||||||
| Superscripts and Subscripts | ||||||||
| Currency Symbols | ||||||||
| Combining Marks for Symbols | ||||||||
| Letterlike Symbols | ||||||||
| Number Forms | ||||||||
| Arrows | ||||||||
| Mathematical Operators | ||||||||
| Miscellaneous Technical | ||||||||
| Control Pictures | ||||||||
| Optical Character Recognition | ||||||||
| Enclosed Alphanumerics | ||||||||
| Box Drawing | ||||||||
| Block Elements | ||||||||
| Geometric Shapes | ||||||||
| Arabic Presentation Forms-A | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Arabic Presentation Forms-B | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms |