URW++ OpenType Development

OpenType is a new cross-platform font format developed by Adobe and Microsoft. URW++ already offers its complete typeface library of Latin fonts in the OpenType format online, covering character sets for Western and Eastern Europe. Fonts in the OpenType format work on both Mac OSX and Windows 2000/XP systems improving cross-platform document compatibility.

The two key advantages of OpenType are its cross-platform compatibility using only one font file for both Mac OSX and Windows 2000/XP and the possibility to have extended character sets in one font (West, East, Cyrillic, Greek, but also small caps, swashes, ligatures, fractions and so on), and to optionally define special Layout Features to enhance the typographic capabilities.

OpenType Standard consists of the complete character sets for Western and Eastern Europe.
OpenType Plus consists of the complete character sets for Western and Eastern Europe and the cyrillic and/or greek character sets.
OpenType Pro consists of the complete character sets for Western and Eastern Europe, the Cyrillic and/or Greek character sets and Expert Sets. It corresponds to Adobe Pro Fonts.

In a nutshell:

1. OpenType fonts are cross-platform compatible.
The OpenType font format uses only a single font file for the outline and the metric data and can be installed on both Mac OSX and Windows 2000/XP systems.

2. OpenType International Support
OpenType fonts by URW++ make multilingual typography easier since they are supplied in the complete Latin character set covering Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Baltic Rim, and Turkey in one font. Based on Unicode, an international multibyte character encoding, additional characters such as Cyrillic and Greek can be easily added to the URW++ OpenType fonts in the future.

3. Support for OpenType Fonts
Full support for Unicode as well as the typographic features are only provided by Adobes products currently, namely new releases of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. Of course, Microsoft and Apple’s OSX support the multilingual feature of OpenType.

4. Flavour
The OpenType format is based on the TrueType format but also supports the PostScript Type1 format with Layout Features (Adobe’s OpenType fonts). OpenType fonts based on the TrueType format come with the file extension .ttf, those based on Type 1 with otf. Any URW++ OpenType font can be installed and used alongside current PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts, printed to most output devices and embedded in PDF files.