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"Whatd'ya Mean, Which Helvetica
Am I Talking About?
It Says Helvetica. There's a Difference?"
An Overview
of TrueType and PostScript® Type 1 Fonts
by Sharon McDonagh
You're in the market for new fonts, and see that typeface companies offer both TrueType and PostScript® Type 1 fonts, or specialize in one or the other. Many typefaces are available in both versions. Confused as to what you should choose? Here's a brief, non-technical synopsis.
The Two Major Formats
The TrueType font format was originally developed by Apple Computer (although it's often thought of as a Windows invention) and soon was used by Microsoft as well. Fonts that ship with the Mac and Windows operating systems (built-in or system fonts) are TrueType. TrueType fonts are one piece — both the printer and the screen images are created from the same font file.
PostScript Type 1 fonts were originally developed by Adobe, and now many other type foundries create Postscript fonts, including Agfa Monotype, ITC and Bitstream. Type 1 fonts must be installed on your computer's hard drive; they don't ship with the operating systems like TrueType. Type 1 fonts have two parts, the screen font that you see on your display, and the printer font for printing it on your desktop printer and on your service bureau's imagesetter. In order to install and use PostScript fonts, you must also install Adobe Type Manager on your computer (a light version of ATM comes free with virtually every Adobe application and typeface package).
Which Should You Choose?
Postscript Type 1 Fonts are most widely used by graphic design and publishing professionals, because the raster image processors (RIPs)* that process files on high-resolution laser printer, imagesetters, and platemakers are PostScript based, and thus are more compatible with the PostScript information contained in Type 1 fonts.
TrueType fonts are the easy choice for corporate and personal environments, since so many businesses and home computers are Windows systems, and generally already have a large selection of TrueType fonts. These fonts are also easy to add to your system, and you don't need any additional software to work with them.
TrueTypes from a major foundry are going to be high-quality and professionally rendered and so the following warning doesn't apply. But note that in the past, TrueType fonts were thought of as inferior by design professionals. One reason for this is that there are a lot of poor quality TrueType fonts floating around. There's nothing to stop someone from scanning in his or her scribbled handwriting, quickly digitizing it, and selling or giving it away as a custom font. While we'd never want to stomp on someone's creativity, the resulting font is NOT going to hold up in an imagesetter, or even necessarily look good on output from an inkjet printer — there are too many proportion, spacing, kerning and node issues that most likely were left out.
If you're designing publications for offset printing, PubCom's advice is to use Type 1 fonts, because PostScript technology is the design standard for printing and graphic arts. By using Type 1 fonts, you'll be able to have your desktop publication files output to high-resolution film by any service bureau. Keep in mind that service bureaus use Postscript imagesetters to output film and most cannot handle TrueType fonts.
(An aside: PubCom has long been aware of a problem some of our clients face — finding service bureaus that can reliably output their work even though they use Windows-based systems and/or non-standard software to complete their print projects. We asked a number of printers with service bureaus in the metropolitan area to answer a few questions, including "Can your imagesetter output files with TrueType fonts?" and "Can your imagesetter output files with a mix of both TrueType and PostScript fonts?" We received encouraging responses from several local companies. Review the PC-based Service Bureau survey responses.)
But you're in love with a funky TrueType font that has just the right pop-art/diner/zoo sensibilities you want for a brochure — what to do? You fear that TrueType fonts will hang up your job at the service bureau. Solution #1: Set your type in a vector drawing program, and use the "convert to curves" or "create outlines" command. Now you've got a graphic that looks just like your font but is not a font, and you can export it as an EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file that will smoothly go through your service bureau's imagesetter.
Solution #2 is to set your type in a image-editing program like Photoshop — the resulting bitmap file (usually TIFF for print publications) also becomes a graphic while retaining the look you want, and can be output on your service bureau's imagesetter.
If You're Designing Web Pages or
Multimedia Titles
You'll see lots of exciting, decorative fonts on web splash pages and even as headlines or subheads in the interiors, even though the body text is nearly always set to the standard Times New Roman or Arial (and this is a whole issue unto itself, not to be covered here...); that is, unless special fonts have been embedded for body text and your system accepts this embedding and views it correctly. Our own site is an example of using decorative fonts: all of the words you see on our front splash page are part of the entire graphic, they are no longer functional type.
If you want to achieve the same look in web design, you'd proceed just as described above. Any font can be set in a drawing, image-editing, or web graphics program (such as Macromedia's Fireworks) for splash pages and headlines, or even portions of "body text" if you so choose, because it is turned into a graphic upon exporting, and you'd place the resulting HTML or GIF or JPEG file as needed. Take advantage of the cool filters and effects that these programs offer you, and the resulting "type" will be its own notable piece of art.
An important caveat is that the above solution creates its own problem: Graphic files are read as images, not as text. It's important to use ALT tags on button, title and informational graphics (charts and graphs). This serves several purposes: an ALT tag on each graphic can be read by JAWS (job access with speech) readers, critical to achieving Section 508 compliance. As well, if someone is web surfing with graphics turned off (by choice or necessity), the use of ALT tags on graphics, particularly graphics of text, ensures that your site is actually literate. And not least, ALT tags are read by the spiders and webots that index sites for search engines.
Break Out Your Wallet
Whether you choose Type 1 or TrueType, buy from a reliable source (click here for PubCom's list of font resources). And BUY the font, don't rely on finding free fonts on the Internet — they are often of poor quality, or worse, have been stolen from legitimate foundries and designers and renamed. (Of course, take advantage if a major company is periodically making one of more of its fonts available for free, as so many do.)
Type designers deserve to be paid for their work — font piracy and unauthorized "sharing" is a widespread problem. Visit the Typeright site (www.typeright.org), whose mission is to promote typefaces as creative works and to advocate their legal protection as intellectual property, for an excellent article by Daniel Will-Harris on this issue, "Whose Font is it Anyway? Or Why the Fonts You're Using Might Not be Doing You Much Good"
One "free" way to obtain quality fonts, completely legal, is to look on your software installation CDs. Desktop publishing, web authoring, drawing, and image-editing programs, such as those from Adobe, Corel and Macromedia often package a selection of fonts on their CDs. You might have to do a bit of searching, as the fonts may be somewhat buried in a folder, but it's a great free resource to expand your font library.
On a similar note, here's a useful page from Microsoft, where you can find out about fonts that are supplied with some Microsoft products. You can also select a font name from a list and search for information about the font, and a list of products that supply it. Microsoft also has static pages listing the fonts supplied with Windows XP and Windows 2000 and information about the latest versions of Microsoft's core fonts for the Web. (Click here for PubCom's list of system fonts that should always be turned on for your computer to operate properly.)
P.S. what to know even more? For a complete, technically-oriented history of PostScript and TrueType font development, read "A History of TrueType" at www.truetype.demon.co.uk/tthist.
* Raster Image Processors (RIPs): an electronic processor attached to an output device, such as a laser printer or imagesetter, which converts the PostScript description of a page to dots which will be used to compose the image on the printer's paper or film. It's the RIP that creates the digital halftone of a continuous tone image. (Definition by "Avoiding the Output Blues: A Digital Publishing Primer" by Taz Tally, Ph.D., ISBN 0-13-084876-X — click here to go to Bevi's Favorite Books.)