OpenType - Comparison To Other Formats

Comparison To Other Formats

Compared with Apple Computer’s "GX Typography"—now called Apple Advanced Typography (AAT)—and with the SIL’s Graphite technology, OpenType is less flexible in typographic options, but superior in language-related options and support. Nevertheless, OpenType has been adopted much more widely than AAT and Graphite, despite AAT being the older technology.

The free software Graphite technology has recently been packaged with the desktop publishing and document editing software, LibreOffice (It is included in both the Windows and Linux distributions, but not with Mac, as AAT is already present).

From a font developer’s perspective, OpenType is, for many common situations, easier to develop for than AAT or Graphite. First, the simple declarative substitutions and positioning of OpenType are more readily understood than AAT’s more complex state tables or the Graphite description language that resembles C syntax. Second, Adobe’s strategy of licensing at no charge the source code developed for its own font development, AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType), allowed third-party font editing applications such as FontLab and FontMaster to add support with relative ease. Although Adobe’s text-driven coding support is not as visual as Microsoft’s separate tool, VOLT (Visual OpenType Layout Tool), the integration with the tools being used to make the fonts has been well received.

Another difference is that an OpenType support framework (such as Microsoft’s Uniscribe) needs to provide a fair bit of knowledge about special language processing issues to handle (for example: Arabic). With AAT or Graphite, the font developer has to encapsulate all that expertise in the font. This means that AAT and Graphite can handle any arbitrary language, but that it requires more work and expertise from the font developers. On the other hand, OpenType fonts are easier to make, but can only support complex text layout if the application or operating system knows how to handle them.

Prior to supporting OpenType, Adobe promoted multiple master fonts and expert fonts for high-end typography. Multiple master fonts lacked the controls for alternate glyphs and languages provided by OpenType, but provided smooth transitions between styles within a type family. Expert fonts were intended as supplementary fonts, such that all the special characters that had no place in the Adobe Standard Encoding character set – ligatures, fractions, small capitals, etc. – were placed in the expert font instead. Usage in applications was tricky, with, for example, typing a Z causing the ffl ligature to be generated. In modern OpenType fonts all these glyphs are encoded with their Unicode indices and selection method (i.e. under what circumstances that glyph should be used).