A simplified schematic representation of a font file would look like this: Some of the information is global, in the sense that it refers to the font as a whole, and some of the information refers to individual glyphs within the font. It’s a related collection of tables - lists of information. What is a font?įrom a computer’s perspective, a font is a database. So put on your overalls, grab your bucket, and let’s take a look inside the font sausage factory.
In an ideal world, this would be information that programmers of layout systems and font handling libraries would need, but implementation details that font designers could safely ignore.īut we are not in an ideal world, and as we will see when we start discussing the metrics tables, the implementation details matter for font designers too - different operating systems, browsers and applications will potentially interpret the information contained within a font file in different ways leading to different layout. In this chapter we’re going to look in some depth about the OpenType font format: how it actually converts the outlines, metrics and advanced typographic features of a font into a file that a computer can interpret. They say that if you enjoy sausages, you shouldn’t look too carefully into how they are made, and the same is true of OpenType fonts.
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