OTF (opentype) vs TTF (truetype) font | Difference between serif and sans serif fonts | Tamil

what’s the difference between Serif and Sans Serif fonts?

Serif and Sans Serif are basically the two most widely used families of fonts. Serif fonts have those small strokes at the top or bottom of the letter, like those decorative flourishes. They are more widely used in print, like books or newspapers. Sans is French for “without”, so Sans Serif fonts don’t have the strokes and are more widely used on the web and in other more liberal mediums such as magazines. Depending on the choice of your font, you can influence how your brand is perceived. Serif fonts look more ornate and professional, whereas Sans Serif fonts look a little bit more fun, hip and young. And although I’m not convinced of this myself, many people suggest that Serif fonts have better readability, making reading long texts much easier.

OTF (opentype) vs TTF (truetype) font

Today, the most used font formats are TrueType and OpenType, but many if not most type users have misco nceptions about these terms. TrueType continues to have a rather bad reputation. It’s understood as an outdated Windows format, that should be avoided if possible. OpenType on the other hand is seen as that shiny new format, which supposedly made fonts platform-compatible and should be preferred. But that isn’t really true. So time to shed some light on this subject. Despite what some people think, TrueType is not a Windows thing. 

Difference between otf and ttf

In fact, it’s an Apple thing. In the 1980s Desktop Publishing emerged and PostScript was an important part of that. And with PostScript came PostScript fonts, but when Apple later built support for such scalable fonts into their operating system, they didn’t went PostScript fonts, but instead developed their own format, which was called TrueType, and later was also given to Microsoft. And until today, almost all system fonts that come with your Windows or Mac operating system are TrueType-based. Adobe then made their PostScript Type 1 font standard more open and all through the 1990s both formats existed side by side. PostScript fonts were more used for professional graphic design and print productions, and TrueType fonts for everything else. And that’s where the bad reputation of TrueType comes from. Those large font packages with poor quality where usually in the TrueType format and aimed at consumers. And those fonts would sometimes not work at all on the very early PostScript Raster Image Processors.

But that was like 20 years ago and is not an issue anymore today. So we had these two competing font formats all throughout the 1990s, but what made things really complicated was that both operating systems required different versions of each format. And one reason for that the way the Mac OS stored font information. A Mac file can consist of a data fork and a resource fork and font data was stored in the latter and because of that you couldn’t use the Mac fonts on Windows and vica versa. You couldn’t even copy a Mac font directly to Windows without loosing it’s content instantly. But this changed with the introduction of Mac OS 10 in 2001. Since then, Mac OS directly supports and uses data fork TrueType fonts. And it was this step that made fonts platform-compatible. So any TTF font will work on Windows and Mac OS since 2001. So there is really no reason to stay away from TrueType-based fonts anymore. In fact, because software companies such as Apple use mostly TrueType fonts themselves, bugs appeared more often for PostScript-flavoured fonts in the recent years. But what is OpenType? Many understand TrueType and OpenType as different formats. And I can’t really blame them. The names and file extensions, TTF and OTF, suggest exactly that. But it’s not really true. OpenType wasn’t a new format, but an extension of the TrueType standard and it is a super-set of it. So wherever there is OpenType support, there is also TrueType suport and a TrueType font will usually comply with the OpenType specifications. 

So in many situtions it doesn’t even make sense to try to differenciate between the two, because the differences are just in optional features. An OpenType font can have a digital signature. An OpenType font can have OpenType feature like automatic ligature replacement. But unless these features are actally used, the format itself doesn’t make much difference. So it also doesn’t make sense to ask about a conversion from TrueType to OpenType, as people often do. There would be nothing to gain, unless the font maker itself actually extends the fonts and puts such OpenType features in. But a plain conversion from TrueType to OpenType is neither necessary nor helpful. Now what about PostScript? You can think about TrueType-flavoured OpenType fonts as TrueType fonts with additional features. But as a successor to the old PostScript Type 1 fonts, there are now also PostScript-flavoured OpenType fonts. Their internal structure is mostly identical to that of TrueType-flavoured fonts. The main difference is the part that deals with the actual character outlines, and here there are now PostScript outlines put it. And that brings us to our last point … It seems simple: TTF means TrueType Font. OTF means OpenType Font. But the truth is, theses file extensions don’t say much and can instead be misleading. The OTF extension was introduced with OpenType and is usually used for PostScript-flavoured OpenType fonts—but not necessarily. A TrueType-flavoured font can use this extension as well, so we can’t really tell from the file extension if we deal with a PostScript- or TrueType-flavoured font or if it even contains OpenType features. 

The TTF extension on the other hand can both be used for regular TrueType fonts, as well as TrueType-flavoured OpenType fonts. This allowed TrueType-flavoured OpenType fonts to be backwards-compatible. Apps that could deal with regular TrueType fonts and expected the TTF extension, could work with the newer fonts and would just ignore the additional OpenType features. So there are technical reasons, why those file extensions exist and why they are used this way, but unfortunately from a user’s point of view, they are not very helpful. What you can tell, is that fonts with either the TTF or OTF extension are platform-compatible and can be used in most apps. 

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