OpenType is a cross-platform font format developed by Adobe and Microsoft in the late 1990s. It has the faculty to include an expanded character set and layout features to provide richer linguistic support and/or advanced typographic control such as various numeral styles, ligatures, small capitals and contextual substitutions. OpenType supports Unicode, which enables the fonts to contain more than 65,000 glyphs while PostScript fonts are technically limited to a maximum of only 256 characters. This means that a user does not need to have separate fonts for Western, Central European or other languages, but could have one single file which supports all these encodings, basically less font files to deal with means simpler font management. OpenType fonts, as a new industry standard, will work in all applications, however only some applications take profit of the advanced OpenType features, other applications will only use the first 256 characters.

The outlines in a OpenType font may be defined in ‘Compact Form Format’ (CFF) based on Postscript Type 1 language (PS) or in TrueType format outlines (TT). All Optimo fonts are mastered in OpenType CFF format.

Since 2005 all Optimo fonts are exclusively delivered in OpenType format, if you don't know what format to select, it is the best choice as it will work on both Mac and Windows platforms. Other formats are only available on request. You can find a brief history of fonts formats from the early 80’ onwards here.

The PostScript Type 1 format was originally developed by Adobe in 1984 and was considered as the graphic industry standard format until it was superseded by the OpenType format. Since 2005, Optimo does not manufacture any PostScript Type 1 fonts anymore.

TrueType was a font format developed by Apple and Microsoft in 1991. The TrueType format defines curves in a different way from PostScript fonts, and for the rendering of outlines uses a more sophisticated hinting process than PostScript fonts which—if manually hinted—will improve the appearance of the font on low-resolution screens. in reality, most of the TrueType fonts found don't incorporate handmade hinting—as this operation requires is very time consuming—as a result, the average of badly rendered TrueType fonts exceeds the PostScript one.

Optimo does not include TrueType fonts for direct download. But as few rare applications only work with TrueType fonts, we propose this format to our licensed customers at no additional charge but only on request. Our TrueType fonts are rendered with basic hintings. However, if you need a special screen optimized font to use at a very small size, we can provide you with manually hinted TrueType font files on demand. This operation will generate extra costs and will delay the delivery date.

Each Optimo typeface has either a Basic Latin 1 or an Extended Latin character set.  Depending on the designers choice some fonts also have arrow sets and additional glyphs. Use the ‘Character Map’ link to have a closer look to the number of glyphs present in a typeface and the supported languages.

Languages covered by the Basic Latin-1 / Mac Roman set:
Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog.

Languages covered by the Basic Latin-1 + Extended Latin-A set:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Bosnian, Catalan, Croatian [Latin], Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, Flemish, French, Frisian, German, Greenlandic, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Moldavian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Polish, Provençal, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Romany, Sámi [Inari], Sámi [Luli], Sámi [Northern], Sámi [Southern], Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian [Latin], Spanish, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Wallon, Welsh, Wolof.

 

Optimo fonts are shipped in OpenType format and are cross-platform, they will work both Mac and Microsoft Windows.

‘Style linking’ is a technique that allows the italic and bold styles of a typeface family to be accessed by clicking on the ‘I’ or ‘B’ icon in your application. To avoid ‘italicized italics’ and ’smear bold’ and because most Optimo fonts are shipped with more than four styles, style linking is turned off by default. You will have to selected the correct weight and/or it's correspondent italic manually.