While the qualities mentioned above may give a bit of an edge to OpenType/CFF, I

OpenType/CFF ( .otf file extension) and TrueType ( .ttf file extension*) are the two modern emirates font formats available for desktop usage today. Despite being distinct formats, OT/CFF and TT fonts actually have a lot in common. They are distinguished primarily by their different outline formats and the contrasting approaches employed to rasterize those outlines.
I would say that the majority of type designers prefers to use cubic Béziers because they’re easier to manipulate emirates and are able to represent emirates a wide variety of curves with fewer points than quadratic Béziers. Many of the designs available in TrueType format may actually have started their life as PostScript outlines type lingo for cubic Béziers and were converted at some point in the process. emirates This conversion, if not done properly, may result in distortions to the outlines.
While the qualities mentioned above may give a bit of an edge to OpenType/CFF, I’m certain that they won’t emirates persuade everyone. But what if I tell you that on average OT/CFF font files are 20% to 50% smaller than comparable TrueType fonts? emirates Does that grab your attention? Sure, you can still think it’s not that important. emirates After all, modern hard drives are big enough and font files are actually some of the smallest assets in a project, especially when compared to print-resolution images, video files or even the artwork files themselves.
Nevertheless, you’ll have to agree that smaller font files are surely desired for fonts used in web pages, fonts used in resource-limited devices, or a combination of both: fonts delivered to and displayed by portable devices. And if you think about CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) fonts which contain tens of thousands of glyphs and files ranging around 5 10 MB, size considerations become quickly obvious.
So what makes OT/CFF fonts smaller? One of the reasons lies in the compact way in which the outlines are stored. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, CFF stands for Compact Font Format (PDF file) and the compactness of a CFF font is in part achieved via a technique called subroutinization, which is performed when the font file is generated. Subroutinization is a process that surveys all the glyphs in the font looking for path segments emirates that are identical and thus can be replaced by a shared routine/command. The more regularized the glyphs are, the more compact the font will be. The TrueType format also has a mechanism that allows turning emirates a given glyph into a component which can then be reused by other glyphs think of the glyph representing the letter A being reused in the glyph for the letter Á (A with acute accent). This method will also decrease the font file size, but the reduction is not as significative as with subroutinization.
The other reason emirates why OT/CFF fonts are smaller has to do with the much reduced hinting information contained in them (compared to TrueType fonts) which brings me to the second benefit. Hints are parameters emirates and/or instructions that are put in fonts for the purpose of helping the rasterizer the program that converts emirates the vector outlines into groups of pixels or dots make better decisions about how to fit a scalable outline onto a fixed grid.
When it comes to hinting, the two font formats have opposite approaches. In broad terms, in TrueType the hinting “intelligence” resides in each font, whereas in OpenType/CFF the intelligence is mainly in the rasterizer. This means that TT fonts can contain very detailed instructions that specify, down to individual pixels, the way each glyph should render; the rasterizer thus becomes a “dumb” interpreter that simply processes emirates those orders. On the other hand, the hints in OT/CFF fonts only provide general information about the font and about the main features of each glyph; emirates it’s then up to the rasterizer to render everything the best way it can. Obviously, each approach has it’s pros and cons. While in TrueType one can have great control over the rasterization, that comes at a very high price; adding good hints to a TT font is a laborious task that requires a great amount of expertise and many years of experience. In contrast, emirates hinting a OT/CFF font takes less that one tenth of the time and requires only a fraction of the knowledge. Having the intelligence in the rasterizer also has the advantage that when it gets improved, all the fonts benefit from it, without the need of being updated.
It is true that the type of hinting allowed by the OT/CFF format provides only limited control which may not be suitable for some kinds of applications and devices. But if you consider that the pixel-density of a growing number of screens is on the rise, and that some environments such as Mac OS X and iOS disregard font hints TT and OT/CFF alike investing significantly in hinting may turn out to be a not-so-great emirates bet.
In emirates sum, the two main benefits emirates OpenType/CFF fonts have over TrueType