Font formats

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

FontForge is a FOSS font editor which supports many common font formats. Developed primarily by George Williams until 2012, FontForge is free software and is distributed under a mix of the GNU General Public License Version 3 and the 3-clause BSD license. It is available for operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and progress has been made on localizing it into 21 languages including Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Swedish, Korean, and Croatian.

Metafont is a description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into e.g. PostScript. Metafont was devised by Donald Knuth as a companion to his TeX typesetting system.

file format for fonts in web pages

type of font files encoded in outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting

programmable Unicode-compliant smart-font technology and rendering system developed by SIL International as free software

computer font with continuous ranges of design variants

file format family

extension to Adobe Systems' Type 1 PostScript fonts

OpenType inherited font format, from Microsoft with MTX compression

SFNT is a font file format which can contain other fonts, such as PostScript, TrueType, OpenType, Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts. SFNT stands for spline font or scalable font, and was originally developed for TrueType fonts on the Macintosh and used by Apple Computer's QuickDraw. SFNT was named after the resource tag the Macintosh used internally to track font data.