A meandering bibliography of font related things¶
Font File Formats¶
- 
- Supplement (discussion of multiple master fonts & counter hints) 
 
- PostScript Multiple Master 
- Type2 (In March of 2000, Adobe removed multiple master support from Type2 and CFF files) - Type2 MM format specification (In OBSOLETE type2 spec) 
- CFF MM format specification (In OBSOLETE CFF spec) 
 
 
- 
- For more information see under OpenType fonts 
 
- PostScript Type3 - PostScript Language Reference Manual 3.0 (see section 5.7) 
 
- PostScript Type14 (Chameleon) - The PLRM (5.8.1) documents that this font format is undocumented. 
 
- 
- (FontForge’s implementation of this format is a superset of what Adobe accepts, and a superset of what Adobe documents. Neither can completely describe opentype. Adobe claims they will update the feat spec in late 2007). 
 
- PFM - I can’t find microsoft’s docs for pfm files any more, I think the format may be obsolete having been replaced by ntf. 
 
- 
- This format is supposed to replace the pfm files above in windows >2000. I can’t find any docs on it. 
 
- 
- X11 Long Font Descriptor spec defines standard X BDF Properties 
- ABF – Binary format 
 
- True Type Standard - (Sadly different sources have slightly different definitions of less important parts of the standard, be warned) 
- Apple Advanced Typography extensions to TrueType 
- Apple distortable font (variation tables) – vaguely equivalent to Multiple Master fonts for TrueType 
- OpenType (postscript embedded in a truetype wrapper, or advanced typography tables in a truetype wrapper) - PostScript Type2 
- Adobe’s version of file format - SING Gaiji extension (more information is available in the documentation subdirectory of the Glyphlet GDK) 
 
- Possible source of script codes for scripts not specified by MS/Adobe: ISO 15924 
- Microsoft’s full list of locale/language IDs (not all are supported, some may never be) 
 
- Open Font Format Specification (ISO/IEC 14496-22:2007) - (based on OpenType 1.4 but an international standard) 
- WOFF – Web Open Font Format, mozilla’s compressed sfnt format 
- PostScript Type42 (the opposite of opentype, it’s truetype embedded in postscript) 
- SVG 1.1 fonts 
- Windows raster font formats 
- X11 pcf format - Sadly there is no real standard for this. There’s the source code used by X11. 
 
- TeX font formats 
- To make these viewable you probably want to do something like: - $ weave pktype.web - $ pdftex pktype.tex 
 
- SIL Graphite Fonts (smart font extension to TrueType. Additional tables containing rules for composing, reordering, spacing, etc. glyphs) 
- Palm pilot fonts (pdb files) 
- OpenDoc. Sadly Proprietary so I shan’t support it. 
- Acorn RISC OS font format (these fonts are often zipped up with a non-standard zip). 
- Ikarus IK format is documented in Peter Karow’s book * Digital Formats for Typefaces,* Appendices G&I. (copies may still be available from URW++) - Interestingly the exact format of a curve is up to the interpretation program. 
- sfd files (FontForge’s internal spline font database format) 
- cidmap files (Fontforge’s format for mapping cids to unicode) 
- XML formats 
Other font links
- 
- (old reference manual) 
 
- Downloadable PS CID CJK fonts (this site also has cmap files)`others <ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/nutshell/cjkv/adobe/samples/>`__ 
- Downloadable OTF CID CJK fonts (this site also has cmap files) 
- PANOSE - PANOSE Classification Metrics Guide by Hewlett-Packard Corporation, 1991 - 1997 
- PANOSE: An Ideal Typeface Matching System for the Web by Robert Stevahn, 1996 
- PANOSE 2.0 White Paper by Hewlett-Packard Corporation, 1993 
- PANOSE on Wikipedia 
- Classifying Arabic Fonts Based on Design Characteristics: PANOSE-APANOSE by Jehan Janbi, 2016 
 
Related software¶
Unicode¶
- 
- Apple’s corporate use extensions (0xF850-0xF8FE) 
- Adobe’s corporate use extensions (0xF634-0F7FF) (also includes some of Apple’s codes above) 
- FontForge’s corporate use extensions (0xF500-0xF580) 
- A registry of code points in the private area (does not include any of Adobe’s or Apple’s codepoints) 
- American Mathematical Society’s corporate use extensions (0xE000-0xF7D7) 
- MicroSoft uses 0xF000-0xF0FF in their “Symbol” encoding (3,0) when they want to an uninterpreted encoding vector (ie. a mapping from byte to glyph with no meaning attached to the mapping) 
 
- 
- Glyph names for new fonts (these are the names FontForge automatically assigns to glyphs) 
- Adobe Glyph Names provides further synonyms 
 
- Linux issues 
Other Encodings¶
- Microsoft’s Codepages, and at the unicode site 
- TeX latin encodings (possibly also on your local machine in - /usr/share/texmf/dvips/base)
Books¶
FontForge¶
Typography¶
Font editor concepts¶
Karow, Peter, 1994, Font Technology, Description and Tools
Karow, Peter, 1987, Digital Formats for Typefaces
TeX¶
Hoenig, Alan TeX Unbound: LaTeX and TeX Strategies for Fonts, Graphics & More
Knuth, Donald, 1979, TeX and METAFONT, New Directions in Typesetting
Interview¶
I was interviewed by the Open Source Publishing people at LGM2. There’s an mp3 file of the interview available on their site.
 
