OpenType Fonts
OpenType is a font format from Adobe and Microsoft. It’s based on Unicode, which uses a double-byte encoding system. You don’t need to know the technical points of it—all you need to know is that by using this encoding, a font can now contain more than 65,000 glyphs instead of the basic 256 we’ve been limited to all this time.
A glyph is an individual symbol for a character. For instance, the lowercase letter “z” is a character. But you might have a capital Z, a small cap z, a swash Z, and an accented Ź. Each of these is considered a glyph, even though they are all the same character.
An OpenType font can include entire character sets for true-drawn small caps, fractions, swashes, ligatures—all explained in the following chapters. ...
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