OpenType : Java Glossary

A joint project of Microsoft and Adobe to provide cross-platform downloadable fonts. They work on Window, Mac, Sun etc. OpenType fonts usually have the extension *.otf. It is supported in:

Inside it might be either TrueType of PostScript. I don’t yet know if otf support implies support for both variants.

Have a look at the Warnock Pro Opticals OpenType font. This is a work of art. Look at the PDFs (Portable Document Formats) to get a better feel for what they will look like typeset. I feel awed to look at it, much the way some people tell me they feel awe on seeing Michaelangelo’s David. The aesthetic skill involved is so infinitely greater than ever I could even conceive of achieving.

OpenType is used for video titling in MP4 video. Adobe adds the suffix pro to all its OpenType fonts. OpenType fonts have a 16-bit encoding vector allowing up to 64,535 glyphs. Some fonts even support 32-bit code points. OpenType fonts have hints for more precise rendering at small point sizes.

Some OpenType fonts include four optical size variations: caption, regular, subhead and display. Called Opticals, these shape variations have been optimised for use at specific point sizes. Although the exact intended sizes vary by family, the general size ranges include: caption (6-8 point), regular (9-13 point), subhead (14-24 point) and display (25-72 point).

One character may correspond to several glyphs; the lowercase a, a small cap a and an alternate swash lowercase a are all the same character, but they are three separate glyphs. To the best of my knowledge, Java does not support these variants because Unicode doesn’t.

There are multiple mappings from code point to glyph to handle a variety of encodings such as Symbol, Unicode, ShiftJIS, PRC (People’s Republic of China), Big5, Wansung, Johab and UCS-4. The most important one for Java is Unicode.

Some OpenType fonts have ligatures and caret positioning for ligatures. The OpenType people call this glyph substitution. Java has no support for these.

Opentype fonts provide for both 16-bit Unicode and 32-bit UCS-4 glyph encoding tables. I believe there is a limit of 65,535 glyphs.

Java Font Support

AWT (Advanced Windowing Toolkit) will only support the five basic logical fonts, unless you paint on a Canvas, however, oddly under Fedora and AWT you can use up to 82 of your installed fonts. If you try to use more, you get an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. The above information may be incorrect or may become incorrect at any time. Feel free to try any fonts with Java on any platform. The worst that could happen is they won’t work.