The Robothon conference in The Hague is always an exceptional event, bringing together designers and developers interested in the technical aspects of type design. While it is a great opportunity to meet people and exchange ideas, it is also a place to hear about the latest developments in type technology. This year, many presentations focused on hinting, two of which were presented by members of the Adobe Type Team. Continue reading…
A month ago, Typekit rolled out improved font rendering on Windows, and began serving certain typefaces in OpenType CFF (PostScript Type 1) format*, instead of the more customary TrueType format. Yesterday, they began serving selected Adobe Web Fonts as CFF as well, and the result is noticeably better appearance for large text sizes.
Typekit observed that, although TrueType fonts tend to look better at text sizes with Microsoft’s ClearType subpixel antialiasing in Windows GDI rendering environments (still the majority of web viewers out there), there can be distracting pixelation on some diagonal features at large point sizes. Their clever solution is to serve CFF fonts for certain display designs which are unlikely to be used at smaller text sizes. GDI will only apply grayscale antialiasing to Type 1 fonts, resulting in smoother appearance. On Mac OS X and in some newer Windows environments (DirectWrite, to be more specific), the quality is essentially the same as TrueType.
Large letters rendered in Windows GDI from TrueType outlines (left) and CFF (right). (Image: the Typekit Blog)
Here at Adobe, we’re obviously pleased to see CFF fonts served where it makes sense to do so. We think CFF has certain qualities and advantages which often make it a better choice — on the web and elsewhere. (Later this month I will be speaking more about this at the ATypI conference in Reykjavíc, Iceland.) To read more on this subject from Typekit and to see more examples, see yesterday’s post on the Typekit Blog.
* When referring to “PostScript,” “Type 1″ or “CFF” fonts, what I really mean is OpenType with this outline format in it. OpenType fonts can contain outlines in either CFF or TrueType format. CFF — the Compact Font Format — is a variation of the original Type 1 font format, created by Adobe along with the PostScript language.
Some more additions to the Adobe Web Fonts collection are available today through our partners, Typekit and WebINK.
First, one of the most popular Adobe Web Font families so far, Chaparral Pro, has been supplemented with more optical sizes (Caption, Subhead and Display) in a range of weights, from Light to Bold. Chaparral is the only design Carol Twombly created with an optical size axis, so we’re pleased to now offer you more choices to explore Carol’s entire design.
We are excited to announce that, beginning today, over 180 of Adobe’s Web Fonts are available through Extensis’ WebINK web font service. Those of you who already use WebINK have some fantastic new fonts from which to choose. And for the rest of you who are not yet using Adobe fonts on your web pages, you now have more great ways to get started with Adobe Web Fonts.
The Adobe Type Team is happy to announce the release of twenty-two new Adobe Web Fonts. These fonts were made available by our partner, Typekit, earlier today, and adds four new families to the Adobe Web Font collection.
OpenType/CFF (.otf file extension) and TrueType (.ttf file extension*) are the two modern 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.
The glyph outlines in OT/CFF fonts are made of cubic Bézier paths whereas in TT fonts they’re made of quadratic Béziers.
Two similar paths. Cubic Bézier (left) and quadratic Bézier (right).
You may remember my earlier blog post in which I stated that turning on ClearType makes the fonts look better on Windows, and that is generally true if the text is set at a small size (i.e. 9–16 px). But at the same time, text set at a large size displays jagged edges, whereas it doesn’t if the font smoothing option is set to anti-aliasing (aka grayscale).
Headlines from Typekit's homepage rendered by Google Chrome 7.x on Windows 7 with ClearType turned on. Notice the jagged edges on the curved top and bottom parts of the letters.
In what I consider an indication of great things to come, Adobe’s Acrobat.com site now features our exclusive corporate typeface design, Adobe Clean, delivered for us by our web font partner, Typekit. (We have already done the same for Typblography.) We are looking forward to Adobe Clean making its way onto other Adobe web sites in the weeks and months ahead.
Of course Adobe Clean has already been used on Adobe’s web sites, but anywhere else you have seen it has used (and is likely still using) pre-rendered bitmaps, or font replacement techniques like sIFR or Cufón. Although the latter techniques offer some advantages over the former, neither is as elegant, convenient and flexible as CSS’s @font-face rule.
And just a reminder: Don’t go looking for Adobe Clean on Typekit’s site. It was created and is being hosted for Adobe’s exclusive use — so it won’t be available to anyone else, anywhere. Of course Typekit has plenty of other fabulous Adobe typefaces for you to employ in your own work, so have a look.
For more information on the Adobe Clean typeface family, see last year’s blog post.
We’re happy to announce that earlier today, Typekit released 16 additional fonts of Garamond Premier Pro (Text and Caption). As you might recall from Christopher Slye’s post back in September, we went out and asked customers what fonts they wanted for the web. We heard some great feedback and thank everyone who chimed in.
Based on what we heard, we decided on a two-pronged approach for additional releases — to offer new families with just a few fonts and to extend certain families to include more weights. Our next web font release will include some new families for you to play with, but our first priority was to extend the offering for Garamond Premier Pro to include two more optical size ranges, Text (Regular) and Caption, for a total of 16 additional fonts. Our initial release included only the ten Display size fonts.
On Monday, Adobe debuted Adobe AIR® 2.5 at MAX. With this latest version, AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) supports web fonts with the CSS @font-face rule. This occasion seems like a good time to talk a bit about Adobe’s current font licensing policies for web fonts. Let me try to address a few of the big licensing issues that affect web fonts, in plain English, and without creating anxiety for our legal department. It’s a fine line to walk.
