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I know very little about typography. What are the differences in terms of opentype vs truetype. I do know that they are types of formats to render fonts (correct me if i'm wrong).

Are there limitations between opentype and truetype?

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2 Answers

Adobe offers some great readin on type formats: See Adobe explanations here

I hesitate to simply answer with a link, but there's so much information which could be posted based on the somewhat open-ended question......

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That's a good and important link, nonetheless. – Alan Gilbertson Jan 26 '12 at 1:45

They are file formats for storing font information.

TrueType was invented by Apple as a competition to Adobe's PostScript Type1. Both TrueType and PostScript fonts became the standard file formats for fonts for the past 3 decades or so of desktop publishing. In terms of your average designer, the differences between the two are relatively unimportant.

OpenType was designed to replace these and was created initially by Adobe and Microsoft. It's basically a newer format that is more robust. For a designer, the primary benefits of OpenType over previous formats are a) an much larger character set and b) automatic alternative character and ligature support (for software that supports it).

Wikipedia covers it well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType

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Add the very important benefit that OpenType fonts are completely platform-agnostic. Before OpenType, we'd run into endless problems with cross-platform incompatibilities, usually at the worst possible time. In my own work, if an font isn't OpenType I either a) don't use it at all, or b) outline the text before it goes to prepress. – Alan Gilbertson Jan 26 '12 at 1:44

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