Chris Dickman (bio)

Rather than rehashing the now-ancient "font wars" of the early 90's, in which the TrueType and PostScript formats vied for the hearts and minds of designers, let's just say that the result of all that hubbub was the creation of the OpenType format, which took as its starting point the ability to incorporate outlines from both formats. Interesting enough, but the format provides many real advantages for designers over its predecessors.

The first is its cross-platform transparency, ending the age-old Mac/Windows version dance. Also significant is that PostScript fonts have an inherent limitation in the number of glyphs they can contain, something that TrueType improved on and which found its way into the OpenType format. Sure, English is one of the world's dominant languages, but there are still plenty that require special characters, something that can be addressed via OpenType. Last, and by no means least, font designers can make use of OpenType Layout tables, which contain information on glyph substitution and placement, justification and baseline positioning. The result is increased flexibility for users and overall improved text quality.

I have to admit that all of this seemed a bit theoretical to me until I actually started experimenting with P22's Cézanne Pro, released in June of this year. Talk about a font with personality! Based on the handwriting of artist Paul Cézanne, it was originally created for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and subsequently expanded to take full advantage of the OpenType format. The examples I created below in Photoshop CS2 (which supports OpenType) show just how different the letterforms and combinations can be, simply by using different options in Photoshop's OpenType menu. The font includes over 1,200 glyphs and "smart features" that automatically substitute letter combinations, with the overall goal of creating a more natural handwriting effect.

Fonts thus move away from being simply static bitmap representations of vector designs, and take on a new role as savvy software assistants to the design process. Look for ever-more "intelligent" fonts in 2006.

Below are some samples from a more recent P22 release, Operina Pro. Designed by James Grieshaber, who also created Cézanne Pro, Operina Pro is a set of calligraphic script fonts based on Ludovico degli Arrighi's book, La Operina. Packed with small caps, old style figures and full European, Cyrillic and Greek character sets, it also automatically converts numbers as you type to Roman Numerals. Pretty cool. The example below, illustrating a quote from the Marquis de Sade, nicely shows off some of the alternate character and swash options.

While P22 is to be congratulated for embracing and extending the capabilities of OpenType, lots of other foundries are getting into the act. Below is an example of Pericles, a recent release from Ascender, packed with 433 glyphs that include 12 stylistic alternates and 17 ligatures, along with a full set of capitals, small caps, superscript/subscript and petite small capital letters.

Adobe and Microsoft collaborated to create OpenType, so it should come as no surprise that Adobe provides fonts in the new format, including the 2,200-font Font Folio package (attention, Santa!). Its most notable OpenType release this year was the recent Garamond Premier Pro (shown below), created by Adobe senior type designer Robert Slimbach, which packs in broad Latin and pan-European language coverage, a wide variety of weights and optically-sized fonts.

Even venerable Monotype is getting into the act and recently announced that the majority of its collection is now available in OpenType format. For fonts with a bit more attitude, check out FontShop, which has been updating its fonts to take advantage of OpenType, such as FF Meta Pro, shown below.

So what do you think, was 2005 The Year of OpenType, or what?

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com