OpenType on Macs running System 9 and earlier

On the Macintosh running MacOS 8.6 or later, you need ATM Light or Deluxe 4.6 to be able to handle OpenType fonts. Because of buggy Unicode support, only the standard 228 characters found in PostScript fonts can be accessed.

Apple first implemented support for OpenType themselves in System 9.6.

The filetype for OpenType fonts is identical to TrueType: sfnt.

OpenType on Macs running OS X

Mac OS X has built-in support for OpenType. In the first releases of OS X, the implementation was fairly basic, forcing software vendors who want to make use of some of the sophisticated features of OpenType, to write that code themselves. In OS X 10.4 Apple enhanced the support for OpenType significantly.

OpenType on Windows systems

General info

• OpenType fonts are the first fonts that actually use sensible filenames on Windows systems. Instead of cryptic names like Courbd.ttf which are used for TrueType and PostScript fonts, OpenType fonts use names like Palatino-BoldItalic.otf.
• OpenType fonts containing TrueType outlines use the same .TTF filename extension as TrueType fonts. PostScript OpenType file names use .OTF as extension.
• The icon that is used for OpenType fonts has a large “O” in its center. Below is the icon that is used in Windows XP.

  

Windows 95, 98 & ME
Windows 95, 98 and ME support OpenType fonts that use TrueType outlines. For OpenType fonts that use PostScript outlines, ATM 4.1 or ATM Light 4.1 has to be installed. Windows 95, 98 and ME applications (apart from MS Office and some other programs) do not support the extended character set of OpenType fonts.

Windows NT
Windows NT 4 is similar to its smaller cousings: only for PostScript based OpenType fonts is ATM 4.1 or ATM Light 4.1 required. Windows NT 4 applications support the extended character set of OpenType fonts.

Windows 2000, XP, Vista
Windows 2000 was the first operating system with extensive built-in support for OpenType fonts. It shipped with an excellent OpenType version of Palatino. A screen dump is shown below. As you can see, OpenType fonts can take up quite a lot of room.

For Windows XP, an extension is available which provides a better overview of the properties of both OpenType and TrueType fonts.

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