I think they work just fine. No harm in trying it out anyway. Just toss one into one of your Fonts folders or try using Font Book to install it, and see if it shows up in your apps. You might have to restart your apps, and maybe (I doubt it) it will only work in Cocoa apps, but it really can't mess anything up if it's not compatible. It just won't do anything in that case.
The other day, a friend e-mailed a font that has installed on WindowsXP. He sent the .ttf file and all I had to do was double-click the font icon to install in MacOS-X. It opened up Font Book and installed it as it normally does. The new font works perfectly.
I just tried to install some japanese true type fonts(MS Gothic/Mincho, Kochi-substitute Gothic/Mincho) using Font book. It works fine above 12 points. But when I set it to 10 pt, the characters all messed up and scrambled together(i.e. they get too close to each other until you cant read them).....
Mathematical representations of font characters differ between TrueType and PostScript.
Quote:
The first difference between TrueType and PostScript fonts is their use of different sorts of mathematics to describe their curves. Conversions between the two formats are typically imperfect: although mathematically speaking the quadratic B-splines of TrueType are a subset of the cubic Bézier curves of PostScript, there are usually small rounding errors no matter which direction one converts fonts; however, the errors are greater in going from PostScript to TrueType than vice versa. More importantly, hinting information does not directly translate in either direction between the two formats.
Some articles have said that TrueType fonts require more points than PostScript, or that they take longer to rasterize because the math is more complicated. In fact, the math is simpler (quadratics are simpler than cubics), and a few shapes take fewer points in TrueType than in PostScript (a circle takes twelve points in PostScript vs. eight in TrueType). However, some PostScript rasterizers are unsurprisingly going to be faster at dealing with PostScript, and it's true that most fonts will end up using more points in TrueType, even if the mathematical description of the curves is simpler.
The primary advantage of TrueType over PS1 fonts is the fact that TrueType allows better hinting. PostScript Type 1 fonts can hint vertical and horizontal features, overshoots, stem snaps, equal counters, and shallow curves ("flex"). Several of these can have a threshold pixel size at which they activate.
TrueType hints can do all that PostScript can, and almost anything else, as defined by the very flexible instructions. This includes controlling diagonals, moving speci=DEed points on the glyph outlines at specific arbitrary sizes to improve legibility. This ability to move points at a specific point size allows the font production staff to hand-tune the bitmap pattern produced by the outline at any specified size.
This is really symptomatic of a larger philosophical difference. PostScript uses "dumb" fonts and a "smart" interpreter, while TrueType uses relatively smarter fonts and a dumber interpreter. This means that PostScript hints tell the rasterizer what features ought to be controlled, and the rasterizer interprets these using its own "intelligence" to decide how to do it. Therefore, if Adobe upgrades the PostScript interpreter, the hinting can be improved.
Contrariwise, TrueType puts very specific instructions (some TT aficionados don't like to call them hints) into the font to control how it will appear. Thus the font producer has the potential for very fine control over what happens when the font is rasterized under different conditions. However, it requires serious effort on the part of a font developer to actually take advantage of this greater hinting potential.
... At present many of the commercially available TrueType fonts one sees at the corner software store are of poor quality, coming in "zillion-fonts-for-a-buck" collections. Many of these fonts were originally shareware or public domain PostScript fonts, and have been converted to TrueType using some basic automatic utility. The outlines and hinting are no better than they were in the PostScript versions, and will suffer slightly in almost any automatic conversion. Usually in the case of extremely cheap collections, they weren't the best quality PostScript fonts even before conversion to TrueType.
This would imply that TrueType requires more management of sizes and hinting to get similar smoothness (smart font, dumb implementation) as opposed to Postscript (dumb font, smart interpretation).
Not sure if it's the only reason (particularly with foreign fonts potentially having different kerning settings built into the characters), but it might help explain the technical background.
It is commonly accepted that many TrueType fonts are cheap conversions from bitmaps and tend to be packaged in high-volume, low value collections, whereas most PostScript fonts are built by designers and foundries and are specifically intended for professional graphic use.
I generally expect that 'equivalent' fonts in each form will almost always reveal the PS version is superior at high resolution and the TT tends to be blocky at some font sizes.
You might give this free utility a try. It isn't a miracle worker, but there's a change it might save the day in this case. It's free in any case, so there's nothing to lose by using it on a copy of the font:
Mathematical representations of font characters differ between TrueType and PostScript.
This would imply that TrueType requires more management of sizes and hinting to get similar smoothness (smart font, dumb implementation) as opposed to Postscript (dumb font, smart interpretation).
Not sure if it's the only reason (particularly with foreign fonts potentially having different kerning settings built into the characters), but it might help explain the technical background.
It is commonly accepted that many TrueType fonts are cheap conversions from bitmaps and tend to be packaged in high-volume, low value collections, whereas most PostScript fonts are built by designers and foundries and are specifically intended for professional graphic use.
I generally expect that 'equivalent' fonts in each form will almost always reveal the PS version is superior at high resolution and the TT tends to be blocky at some font sizes.
This is just silly. A font's quality has little to do with its format and a lot do with its foundry. You can expect poor quality fonts in those 15,000 fonts collections from Fontz 'R' Us, whether they are in True Type, PostScript, or whatever. In a similar vein, you can expect high quality in fonts purchased from name brand foundries like Adobe or Linotype, whether they are in PostScript or TrueType. It's like anything else in life; you get what you pay for.
I'm curious...Aren't the character mappings for PC TrueType fonts different from Mac TrueType? Especially for diacritical marks and ligatures? Wouldn't the differences carry-over? Not that that makes it unusable or anything...just a tad confusing at times, I suppose.
I'm curious...Aren't the character mappings for PC TrueType fonts different from Mac TrueType? Especially for diacritical marks and ligatures? Wouldn't the differences carry-over? Not that that makes it unusable or anything...just a tad confusing at times, I suppose.
Clearly, the OS takes care of that. Windows knows which characters it wants. MacOS X knows which characters it wants. Since you are not an OS, why should it confuse you?
Clearly, the OS takes care of that. Windows knows which characters it wants. MacOS X knows which characters it wants. Since you are not an OS, why should it confuse you?
Because certain characters require different keystrokes to produce them on the different platforms. And certain characters don't even exist on one or the other platform.
Because certain characters require different keystrokes to produce them on the different platforms. And certain characters don't even exist on one or the other platform.
As I said, each OS knows which characters it wants. Or is it a difficult concept that Windows might require character no. 252, but the Mac makes no use of it; and that the Mac requires character no. 206, but Windows has no need of it? Is it really difficult for you to understand that an OS can ignore some characters in a font file, but use others in the same file?
I believe he may be talking about how to generate the characters.
ie, option-e + e = é on the Mac, but some other keystroke (or seven) gets you the character on Windows.
In that case, the keystrokes are really just key combinations that access particular characters in the font. Your example of é is a single character, Character No. 141, to be specific. Windows uses a different technique to access the é character, but it is still Character No. 141.
Once upon a time, DOS used 7-bit ASCII (128 values) and Apple used 8-bit ASCII (256 values).
Macintosh users discovered these extra characters allowed new languages, and the Mac dominated multilingual publishing for years. When MicroSoft eventually realized that extra characters were useful, they adopted 8-bit ASCII, but in typical MicroSoft form, chose their own proprietary implementation of the character mapping to get there.
To this day, ASCII table positions differ slightly from Mac to PC... which is why some imported PC docs have rectangle characters (or accented Ó) on the Mac where control characters were in the PC version.
Quote:
What type of questions will be answered by this page?
To give a couple of examples:
The Spanish n-tilde (ñ) typed on a Mac shows as an endash (-) on a Windows machine. Why? Does this happen haphazardly?
The n-tilde (ñ) typed on a Windows shows as a capital O with gravus accent (Ò) on a Mac. (Mac users with a TrueType + bitfont of Geneva will see a box; display this page in Times or set an awkward font size like 13 points).
16 Windows characters cannot be shown on a Macintosh with one of the standard fonts.
25 Macintosh characters cannot be displayed on a Windows computer with a standard font.
Are there any differences between the Windows Latin 1 encoding and the internationally standardized ISO-8859-1 encoding?
Where is the Euro currency symbol?
Can I display reliably any of the Symbol font characters?
What are the names of all these Symbols?
Here's the PC character map for Adobe Garamond for example:
Comments
The other day, a friend e-mailed a font that has installed on WindowsXP. He sent the .ttf file and all I had to do was double-click the font icon to install in MacOS-X. It opened up Font Book and installed it as it normally does. The new font works perfectly.
Any idea what this would happens?
The first difference between TrueType and PostScript fonts is their use of different sorts of mathematics to describe their curves. Conversions between the two formats are typically imperfect: although mathematically speaking the quadratic B-splines of TrueType are a subset of the cubic Bézier curves of PostScript, there are usually small rounding errors no matter which direction one converts fonts; however, the errors are greater in going from PostScript to TrueType than vice versa. More importantly, hinting information does not directly translate in either direction between the two formats.
Some articles have said that TrueType fonts require more points than PostScript, or that they take longer to rasterize because the math is more complicated. In fact, the math is simpler (quadratics are simpler than cubics), and a few shapes take fewer points in TrueType than in PostScript (a circle takes twelve points in PostScript vs. eight in TrueType). However, some PostScript rasterizers are unsurprisingly going to be faster at dealing with PostScript, and it's true that most fonts will end up using more points in TrueType, even if the mathematical description of the curves is simpler.
The primary advantage of TrueType over PS1 fonts is the fact that TrueType allows better hinting. PostScript Type 1 fonts can hint vertical and horizontal features, overshoots, stem snaps, equal counters, and shallow curves ("flex"). Several of these can have a threshold pixel size at which they activate.
TrueType hints can do all that PostScript can, and almost anything else, as defined by the very flexible instructions. This includes controlling diagonals, moving speci=DEed points on the glyph outlines at specific arbitrary sizes to improve legibility. This ability to move points at a specific point size allows the font production staff to hand-tune the bitmap pattern produced by the outline at any specified size.
This is really symptomatic of a larger philosophical difference. PostScript uses "dumb" fonts and a "smart" interpreter, while TrueType uses relatively smarter fonts and a dumber interpreter. This means that PostScript hints tell the rasterizer what features ought to be controlled, and the rasterizer interprets these using its own "intelligence" to decide how to do it. Therefore, if Adobe upgrades the PostScript interpreter, the hinting can be improved.
Contrariwise, TrueType puts very specific instructions (some TT aficionados don't like to call them hints) into the font to control how it will appear. Thus the font producer has the potential for very fine control over what happens when the font is rasterized under different conditions. However, it requires serious effort on the part of a font developer to actually take advantage of this greater hinting potential.
... At present many of the commercially available TrueType fonts one sees at the corner software store are of poor quality, coming in "zillion-fonts-for-a-buck" collections. Many of these fonts were originally shareware or public domain PostScript fonts, and have been converted to TrueType using some basic automatic utility. The outlines and hinting are no better than they were in the PostScript versions, and will suffer slightly in almost any automatic conversion. Usually in the case of extremely cheap collections, they weren't the best quality PostScript fonts even before conversion to TrueType.
This would imply that TrueType requires more management of sizes and hinting to get similar smoothness (smart font, dumb implementation) as opposed to Postscript (dumb font, smart interpretation).
Not sure if it's the only reason (particularly with foreign fonts potentially having different kerning settings built into the characters), but it might help explain the technical background.
It is commonly accepted that many TrueType fonts are cheap conversions from bitmaps and tend to be packaged in high-volume, low value collections, whereas most PostScript fonts are built by designers and foundries and are specifically intended for professional graphic use.
I generally expect that 'equivalent' fonts in each form will almost always reveal the PS version is superior at high resolution and the TT tends to be blocky at some font sizes.
http://www.stone.com/TrueBlue/
Originally posted by curiousuburb
Mathematical representations of font characters differ between TrueType and PostScript.
This would imply that TrueType requires more management of sizes and hinting to get similar smoothness (smart font, dumb implementation) as opposed to Postscript (dumb font, smart interpretation).
Not sure if it's the only reason (particularly with foreign fonts potentially having different kerning settings built into the characters), but it might help explain the technical background.
It is commonly accepted that many TrueType fonts are cheap conversions from bitmaps and tend to be packaged in high-volume, low value collections, whereas most PostScript fonts are built by designers and foundries and are specifically intended for professional graphic use.
I generally expect that 'equivalent' fonts in each form will almost always reveal the PS version is superior at high resolution and the TT tends to be blocky at some font sizes.
This is just silly. A font's quality has little to do with its format and a lot do with its foundry. You can expect poor quality fonts in those 15,000 fonts collections from Fontz 'R' Us, whether they are in True Type, PostScript, or whatever. In a similar vein, you can expect high quality in fonts purchased from name brand foundries like Adobe or Linotype, whether they are in PostScript or TrueType. It's like anything else in life; you get what you pay for.
Originally posted by Thorzdad
I'm curious...Aren't the character mappings for PC TrueType fonts different from Mac TrueType? Especially for diacritical marks and ligatures? Wouldn't the differences carry-over? Not that that makes it unusable or anything...just a tad confusing at times, I suppose.
Clearly, the OS takes care of that. Windows knows which characters it wants. MacOS X knows which characters it wants. Since you are not an OS, why should it confuse you?
Originally posted by Mr. Me
Clearly, the OS takes care of that. Windows knows which characters it wants. MacOS X knows which characters it wants. Since you are not an OS, why should it confuse you?
Because certain characters require different keystrokes to produce them on the different platforms. And certain characters don't even exist on one or the other platform.
Originally posted by Thorzdad
Because certain characters require different keystrokes to produce them on the different platforms. And certain characters don't even exist on one or the other platform.
As I said, each OS knows which characters it wants. Or is it a difficult concept that Windows might require character no. 252, but the Mac makes no use of it; and that the Mac requires character no. 206, but Windows has no need of it? Is it really difficult for you to understand that an OS can ignore some characters in a font file, but use others in the same file?
ie, option-e + e = é on the Mac, but some other keystroke (or seven) gets you the character on Windows.
Originally posted by Kickaha
I believe he may be talking about how to generate the characters.
ie, option-e + e = é on the Mac, but some other keystroke (or seven) gets you the character on Windows.
In that case, the keystrokes are really just key combinations that access particular characters in the font. Your example of é is a single character, Character No. 141, to be specific. Windows uses a different technique to access the é character, but it is still Character No. 141.
Macintosh users discovered these extra characters allowed new languages, and the Mac dominated multilingual publishing for years. When MicroSoft eventually realized that extra characters were useful, they adopted 8-bit ASCII, but in typical MicroSoft form, chose their own proprietary implementation of the character mapping to get there.
To this day, ASCII table positions differ slightly from Mac to PC... which is why some imported PC docs have rectangle characters (or accented Ó) on the Mac where control characters were in the PC version.
What type of questions will be answered by this page?
To give a couple of examples:
The Spanish n-tilde (ñ) typed on a Mac shows as an endash (-) on a Windows machine. Why? Does this happen haphazardly?
The n-tilde (ñ) typed on a Windows shows as a capital O with gravus accent (Ò) on a Mac. (Mac users with a TrueType + bitfont of Geneva will see a box; display this page in Times or set an awkward font size like 13 points).
16 Windows characters cannot be shown on a Macintosh with one of the standard fonts.
25 Macintosh characters cannot be displayed on a Windows computer with a standard font.
Are there any differences between the Windows Latin 1 encoding and the internationally standardized ISO-8859-1 encoding?
Where is the Euro currency symbol?
Can I display reliably any of the Symbol font characters?
What are the names of all these Symbols?
Here's the PC character map for Adobe Garamond for example:
from Porting Mac <--> PC Font issues
FontFAQ is comprehensive, even back to NeXT, x11, and earlier.
Long term, many believe the answer is unicode. Some said so ten years ago.