OpenType

Because of wide availability and typographic flexibility, including provisions for handling the diverse behaviors of all the world's writing systems, OpenType fonts are used commonly on major computer platforms.

[6] Adobe joined Microsoft in those efforts in 1996, adding support for the glyph outline technology used in its Type 1 fonts.

[citation needed] Unicode version 3.2 (published in 2002) introduced variation selectors as an encoding mechanism to represent particular glyph forms for characters.

In late 2007, variation sequences for the Adobe-Japan1 collection were registered in the Unicode Ideographic Database,[16] leading to a real need for an OpenType solution.

Apple, Google and Microsoft independently developed different color-font solutions for use in OS X, iOS, Android and Windows.

The enhanced graphic capabilities include support for three types of gradients, affine transformations, compositing and blending modes, and custom re-usable components.

[24] Since at least version 1.4, the OpenType specification had supported "TrueType Collections", a feature of the format that allows multiple fonts to be stored in a single file.

For example, the Noto fonts CJK OTC is ~10 MB smaller than the sum of the four separate OTFs of which it is composed.

[26] The use of a Collection also allowed for combining a very large number of glyphs into a single file, as would be needed for a pan-CJK font.

[30] The concept of fully parametric fonts had been explored in a more general way by Donald E. Knuth in the METAFONT system, introduced in 1978.

[32] TrueType GX and Multiple Master formats, OpenType Font Variations' direct predecessors, were introduced in the 1990s, but were not widely adopted, either.

In particular, emergence of Web fonts and of mobile devices had created interest in responsive design and in seeking ways to deliver more type variants in a size-efficient format.

However, enhancement to the COLR table in OpenType 1.9 has provided a vector format for color glyphs with support for variations.

Adobe Type Manager could add basic Roman support of OpenType PS fonts in Windows 95, 98, or Me.

It is also widely supported in free operating systems, such as Linux (e.g. in multiplatform applications like AbiWord, Gnumeric, Calligra Suite, Scribus, OpenOffice.org 3.2 and later versions,[39] etc.).

As of 2009[update], popular word processors for Microsoft Windows did not support advanced OpenType typography features.

It supports advanced typographic features such as ligatures, old-style numerals, swash variants, fractions, superscript and subscript, small capitalization, glyph substitution, multiple baselines, contextual and stylistic alternate character forms, kerning, line-level justification, ruby characters etc.

Apple's support for OpenType in Mac OS X 10.4 included most advanced typographic features necessary for Latin script languages, such as small caps, old-style figures, and various sorts of ligatures, but it did not yet support contextual alternates, positional forms, nor glyph reordering as handled by Microsoft's Uniscribe library on Windows.

Panorama also offers complete support for advanced typography features, such as ligatures, swashes, small caps, ornaments, ordinals, superiors, old style, kerning, fractions, etc.

Linux version of LibreOffice 4.1 and newer supports many OpenType typography features, because it began to use more sophisticated HarfBuzz text shaping library.

[48][49] For instance, the Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet has some language-specific glyphs for certain letters, which are only preferred and are not strictly mandated.

[54] Some of the new technical features (not present in TeX), such as "cut-ins" (which allows kerning of subscripts and superscripts relative to their bases[55]) and stretch stacks[56] have been patented by Microsoft.

[61] The Gecko rendering engine used by the Firefox web browser also supports some OpenType math features in its MathML implementation.

[64] Emergence of Unicode emoji created a need for TrueType and OpenType formats to support color glyphs.

The multi-layer approach allows a backwards compatible implementation as well as varying the rendering depending on the color context surrounding the glyphs.

[85][86] In OpenType Version 1.8.3, the specification for the SVG table was revised to be more constrained, providing more clarity for implementations and better interoperability.

In 2005, Adobe shipped a new technology in their Creative Suite applications bundle that offers a solution for "gaiji" (外字, Japanese for "outside character").

The SING (Smart INdependent Glyphlets)[88][89] technology that made its debut with Adobe's Creative Suite 2 allows for the creation of glyphs, each packaged as a standalone font, after a fashion.

The package consists of the glyph outline in TrueType or CFF (PostScript style outlines) form; standard OpenType tables declaring the glyph's metrics and behavior in composition; and metadata, extra information included for identifying the glyphlet, its ownership, and perhaps pronunciation or linguistic categorization.

The SING specification also describes an XML format that includes all the data necessary for reconstituting the glyphlet in binary form.