Also, whereas the 1990s was an era of aggressive competition in font technology, often referred to as the font wars who, OpenType Font Variations was developed in a collaborative manner involving several major vendors. 31.

It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueTypes basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior.

OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Those negotiations failed, motivating Microsoft to forge ahead with its own technology, dubbed TrueType Open in 1994.

Adobe joined Microsoft in those efforts in 1996, adding support for the glyph outline technology used in its Type 1 fonts.

Needing a more expressive font format to handle fine typography and the complex behavior of many of the worlds writing systems, the two companies combined the underlying technologies of both formats and added new extensions intended to address those formats limitations.

The name OpenType was chosen for the combined technologies, and the technology was announced later that year.

Adobe finished converting their entire font library to OpenType toward the end of 2002.

As of early 2005 update, around 10,000 OpenType fonts had become available, with the Adobe library comprising about a third of the total.

By 2006, every major font foundry and many minor ones were developing fonts in OpenType format.

Font Ttf Code Ideographic Database

In late 2007, variation sequences for the Adobe-Japan1 collection were registered in the Unicode Ideographic Database, 16 leading to a real need for an OpenType solution.

This resulted in development of cmap subtable Format 14, which was introduced in OpenType version 1.5.

Since Unicode emoji are handled as text, and since color is an essential aspect of the emoji experience, this led to a need to create mechanisms for displaying multicolor glyphs.

OpenType OFF already had support for monochrome bitmap glyph, and so Google proposed that OFF be extended to allow for color bitmaps.

This was the approach being taken by Apple, though Apple declined to participate in extending the ISO standard.

As a result, Apple added the sbix table to their TrueType format in OS X 10.7, 19 while Google proposed addition of the CBDT and CBLC tables to OFF.

Noting existing practice on the Web of layering glyphs of different color on top of one another to create multi-colored elements such as icons, Microsoft proposed a new COLR table to map a glyph into a set of glyphs that are layered, and a CPAL table to define the colors.

Also, individual fonts have a glyph-count limit of 65,535 glyphs, and a Collection file provides a gap mode mechanism for overcoming this limit in a single font file.

Each font within the collection still has the 65,535 limit, however.) A TrueType Collection file would typically have a file extension of.ttc.

The potential existed to provide the same storage and glyph-count benefits to fonts that use CFF-format glyphs (.otf extension).

But the specification did not explicitly allow for that.

For example, the Noto fonts CJK OTC is 10 MB smaller than the sum of the four separate OTFs of which it is composed.

The use of a Collection also allowed for combining a very large number of glyphs into a single file, as would be needed for a pan-CJK font.

The common idea of these formats is that a single font includes data to describe multiple variations of a glyph outline (sometimes referred to as masters), and that at text-display time, the font rasterizer is able to interpolate or blend these variations to derive a continuous range of additional outline variations.

Knuth in the METAFONT system, introduced in 1978.

Font Ttf Professional Type Designers

That system and its successors were never widely adopted by professional type designers or commercial software systems.

TrueType GX and Multiple Master formats, OpenType Font Variations direct predecessors, were introduced in the 1990s, but were not widely adopted, either.

Adobe later abandoned support for the Multiple Master format.

This has led to questions as to whether a re-introduction of similar technology could succeed.

By 2016, however, the industry landscape had changed in several respects.

In particular, emergence of Web fonts and of mobile devices had created interest in responsive design and in seeking ways to deliver more type variants in a size-efficient format.