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TT versus T1: David Glenn

David Glenn from Microsoft's truetype team on truetype versus type 1: Back when the primordial ooze was settling, PostScript was the page description language. PS made it possible for font outlines (the letter design or shape) to be accurately described, displayed and printed. There were other formats but PS took off, especially when it was the page description technology put into a lot of printers, notably the 1985 Apple LaserWriter. Excel and PageMaker and the LaserWriter virtually made the Mac and desktop publishing take off. Adobe owned PostScript so they got to charge a royalty for the technology. Apple eventually wanted to save money and not pay a big hit each time for each laserwriter. Nor did they want to get into the situation where they would have to pay Adobe for each Mac if display PS took off as the onscreen display technology. That was the economic reason for the search for another font technology. A guy named Sampo Kaasila invented TT. Apple included the rasterizer with system 7 and Microsoft licensed the technology. It first shipped in a Microsoft product in Windows 3.1 spring of 1992. Since then, it has taken off in the PC world. In the highend design world, there is still a lot of bias against TT since they spent years learning how to get their proprietary equipment to output PS. Technically, TT is a better format but the bottom line is that your particular needs may be more of a factor as to which format you use. If you need to work with mostly Mac designers or output to imagesetters, or work in a PS environment, then you may find it easier to use Type 1 fonts. There's a big myth that Type 1 fonts are of better quality. The truth is that you can find well made, well designed fonts in both formats. In the early days of TT, a lot of foundries simply took their Type 1 fonts and converted them to the TrueType format to sell them to the PC users. Back then, there weren't a lot of good tools or understanding on how to do this correctly. This led to a lot of crappy TT fonts out there. Plus, bundles by folks trying to pack 1000s of fonts onto a CD without regard to quality gave TT a bad name, which it's still trying to shake to this day.

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