Postcript Font is the worldwide printing and imaging standard.

The PostScript programming language was originally developed by

Adobe Systems to communicate complex graphic printing instructions to
digital printers.

It is now built into many laser printers for high-quality rendering of both
raster and vector graphics.

Postcripts fonts produces good-looking images regardless of the
resolution or color rendering method of the output device, and it takes
full advantage of the capabilities built into the device.

The Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is a more structured,
compact subset of the PostScript language. Almost anything that can be
done in PostScript can be done in PDF.

There are many types of postcript fonts. FE : Postcript type 1 and type 3

Type 1 and Type 3 fonts were introduced by Adobe in 1984
as part of the PostScript page description language. They did
not see widespread use until March 1985, when the first laser
printer to use the PostScript language, the Apple LaserWriter,
was introduced.

Although originally part of PostScript, Type 1 fonts used a
simplified set of drawing operations compared to ordinary
PostScript, but Type 1 fonts added "hints" to help low-
resolution rendering. Originally, Adobe kept the details of
their hinting scheme undisclosed and used a simple
encryption scheme to protect Type 1 outlines and hints,
which still persists today.

Type 3 fonts allowed for all the sophistication of the
PostScript language, but without the standardized approach
to hinting (though some companies such as ATF implemented
their own proprietary schemes) or an encryption scheme.
Other differences further added to the confusion.


TrueType is an outline font standard developed
by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s as a competitor
to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the
most common format for fonts on both the Mac
OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it
offered font developers a high degree of control over
precisely how their fonts are displayed, right down to
particular pixels, at various font sizes. With widely
varying rendering technologies in use today, pixel-level
control is no longer certain in a TrueType font.

The system was developed and eventually released as TrueType
with the launch of Mac OS System 7 in May 1991. The initial
Truetype outline fonts, four-weight families of Times
Roman, Helvetica, Courier, and the Pi font replicated the original
PostScript fonts of the Apple LaserWriter. Apple also replaced
some of their bitmap fonts used by the graphical user-interface
of previous Macintosh System versions (including Geneva,
Monaco and New York) with scalable Truetype outline-fonts. For
compatibility with older systems, Apple shipped these fonts, a
TrueType Extension and a TrueType-aware version of Font/DA
Mover for System Software 6. For compatibility with the
Laserwriter II, Apple developed fonts like ITC Bookman and ITC
Chancery in Truetype format.

All of these fonts could now scale to all sizes on screen and
printer, making the Macintosh System 7 the first OS to work
without any bitmap fonts.

Part of Adobe's response to learning that TrueType
was being developed was to create the Adobe Type
Manager software to scale Type 1 fonts for anti-
aliased output on-screen. Although ATM initially cost
money, rather than coming free with the operating
system, it became a de facto standard for anyone
involved in desktop publishing. Anti-aliased
rendering, combined with Adobe applications' ability
to zoom in to read small type, and further combined
with the now open PostScript Type 1 font format,
provided the impetus for an explosion in font design
and in desktop publishing of newspapers and
magazines.
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built
on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic
structure and adding many intricate data structures for
prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered
trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

The specification germinated at Microsoft, with Adobe
Systems also contributing by the time of the public
announcement in 1996. The specification continues to be
developed actively and is migrating to an open format.

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 today on the major computer platforms.

OpenType's origins date to Microsoft's attempt to license Apple's
advanced typography technology GX Typography in the early
1990s. Those negotiations failed, motivating Microsoft to forge
ahead with its own technology, dubbed "TrueType Open" in
1994.[5] Adobe joined Microsoft in those efforts in 1996, adding
support for the glyph outline technology used in its Type 1 fonts.

These efforts were intended by Microsoft and Adobe to
supersede both Apple's TrueType and Adobe's Type
1 ("PostScript") font formats. Needing a more expressive font
format to handle fine typography and the complex behavior of
many of the world's writing systems, the two companies
combined the underlying technologies of both formats and
added new extensions intended to address those formats'
limitations. The name OpenType was chosen for the combined
technologies, and the technology was announced later that year.

PostScript Fonts

There are generally two main components to PostScript
typefaces :

The first file contains the actual PostScript typeface itself and
is often called the binary or printer file.

The second file contains the typefaces complete name, the
spacing characteristics (font metrics) and information to help
the computer display the typeface on the screen and for
printing the font. Both files must be submitted.

Suitable for printing and imaging.

TrueType Fonts

Truetype fonts only require one file to be submitted but a
separate file needs to be submitted for each instance of the
font. For example, a different file is needed for normal, bold,
italic, bold italic, etc.

TrueType typefaces are generally intended for business office
use and can be less reliable for publishing applications.

Only use TrueType typefaces when the typeface is unavailable
in PostScript format.
OpenType Fonts

OpenType fonts are cross-platform compatible making it
easier to share files across operating systems.
Font management is simpler since there is just one file
involved.
An OpenType font file contains all the outline, metric and
bitmap data in one file.
It can contain TrueType (.ttf extension) or PostScript (.otf
extension) font data and uses ATM to render the font on-
screen. Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop support
OpenType which allows them to use the expanded character
sets and layout features.