PS font or TT fonts? Conversion ok?

[Dewdman42]

I am wondering what the advantages or disadvantages are of using a TT
font vs a PS font (on windows primarily). Also, are there any font
conversion utilities to convert PS into TT, and if so, are they any
good and are there any flaws with converted fonts?

thanks in advance.

[Aandi Inston]

Post by Dewdman42
I am wondering what the advantages or disadvantages are of using a TT
font vs a PS font (on windows primarily).

Should both be fine in Windows 2000 or later, but the game has moved
on a little now, and most professional fonts are now sold as OpenType.

There are a few applications that are picky, and might only work with
particular formats, but this is rare.
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Aandi Inston ***@dial.pipex.com http://www.quite.com
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[Dewdman42]

Thanks for the info. yes actually i am using Finale, which does not
yet support Open type, I have no idea why.

If TT and PS versions of a font are basically comparable and equally
usable in WindowsXP..then I can go with the PS version and not worry
about it.

thanks

Post by Aandi Inston

Post by Dewdman42
I am wondering what the advantages or disadvantages are of using a TT
font vs a PS font (on windows primarily).

Should both be fine in Windows 2000 or later, but the game has moved
on a little now, and most professional fonts are now sold as OpenType.
There are a few applications that are picky, and might only work with
particular formats, but this is rare.
----------------------------------------
Please support usenet! Post replies and follow-ups, don't e-mail them.

[Rod Smith]

Post by Dewdman42
I am wondering what the advantages or disadvantages are of using a TT
font vs a PS font (on windows primarily). Also, are there any font
conversion utilities to convert PS into TT, and if so, are they any
good and are there any flaws with converted fonts?

For screen display, sometimes one format will look better than another,
but in my experience this is mostly a matter of which format has better
hinting for a particular design -- it's not that one format is inherently
better than the other. (Hints are tweaks provided by the font designer
that help the computer display the font legibly at small sizes.)

For printing (and other forms of output), it depends on the printer (or
format). PostScript printers work well with PostScript fonts, obviously,
but modern printing tools all support embedding TrueType fonts in
PostScript output. The main drawback to this is if you need to
subsequently manipulate the output in some way. For instance, if you have
a document that you "print to disk" and then want to convert the
PostScript file into a PDF file, some utilities cope better with embedded
PostScript fonts than with embedded TrueType fonts. With TrueType fonts,
the text may look chunky in the converted PDF document, for instance. This
situation has been improving; it's much less of a problem today than it
was a few years ago. On the flip side, I believe some non-PostScript
printers support TrueType font downloads, which can reduce the amount of
data that must be transferred to the printer, particularly if you use one
font at multiple sizes in a single document. My knowledge of this is from
printers and drivers from several years ago, though; I don't know if this
is still true today or how important it would be.

A few programs and OSs support one format but not another. WordPerfect for
Linux, for instance, supports PostScript Type 1 fonts but not TrueType
fonts. Early versions of Windows only supported PostScript fonts with the
add-on Adobe Type Manager (ATM), but I believe current versions of Windows
support both formats. Some (old) versions of the X Window System only
supported PostScript and some proprietary fonts, but both formats work
with current versions.

All in all, the differences are subtle and mostly relate to special
circumstances.

If you do need to convert between formats, several tools to do so exist.
One that I've used is FontForge (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net). This
is an X-based program, so it runs easily under Unix and Linux; however,
it's supposed to run under Windows if you install a Windows X
implementation. I've used it to make PostScript versions of fonts
distributed in TrueType format for installation in WordPerfect for Linux.
Generally speaking, converting from one format to another results in some
loss of quality. Hints, in particular, are likely to be lost or degraded.