OpenType is a new font format that has been developed by Adobe and Microsoft. The first specifications were published in 1997, but the first OpenType fonts were released in 2000. OpenType can be viewed as a superset of TrueType and PostScript, with added capabilities for advanced typography language dependent features. It is based on Unicode, which gives it a model to support any of the world's languages.
OpenType fonts may include an expanded character set and layout features to provide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control.

Advantages of OpenType

Cross-platform fonts! The OpenType format therefore simplifies font management and the publishing workflow by ensuring that all of the required glyphs for a document are contained in one cross-platform font file throughout the whole publishing workflow. (see the next picture)
Better Language Support
Based on Unicode, an international two-byte character encoding that covers virtually all of the world's languages, OpenType fonts can make multilingual typography easier by including multiple language character sets in one font.
Exciting typographic capabilities via Open Type features: a wide range of special glyphs including ligatures, titlings, swash characters, old style figures, fractions and historical characters. In the past these ?expert? character sets had to be placed into separate font files.
"Wide" fonts: OpenType fonts may have up to 65 000 glyphs, instead of being limited to 256 encoded glyphs (as with today's Type 1 fonts). With a typical Western PostScript fonts you are forcing to install and manage two or more style-related fonts in order to access "expert set" characters. OpenType significantly simplifies font management and the publishing workflow by ensuring that all of the required glyphs for a document are contained in one cross-platform font file throughout the workflow.
the ".otf" flavour of OpenType fonts uses Adobe's "Compact Font Format" (CFF, or Type 2) to represent the font outlines. As a result, the individual fonts are only 50-200K in size, despite their large character sets (some have over 1,000 glyphs).

Advantages of HermesSoft's OpenType PRO

All styles contain the following code pages: Cyrillic, Roman/US (Western), Central European, Greek, Turkish, Icelandic, Croatian, Romanian, Baltic;
Furthermore the packages may include additional support for the languages: Armenian, Georgian (Gruzinski) and Asian Cyrillic - Kazakh, Abazin, Uzbek etc.
All PRO font packages are available in OpenType CFF-Format. CFF is the PostScript flavoured variety of OpenType.

see -> HS Open Type fonts Prices

Additional Software Requirements (ATM, OSes, Applications)

The major operating system manufacturers have put a lot of effort in making OpenType fonts work also on older versions of Mac OS and Windows. It is important to know that many features are not available in certain applications, which are not OpenType-savvy. Support of OpenType fonts is highly dependable on the applications? Unicode support. While some applications, like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop 6, support advanced typographic and layout features, others only do not offer support for Unicode. Glyphs are accessed through codepages which means that only the first 255 characters are available.
General: If you are using an OpenType-savvy ATM, or an OS such as Windows 2000, which has native OpenType support, OpenType fonts should work just as well as Type 1 fonts with almost all existing applications. Additionally, to access automatic features of the fonts requires an OpenType-savvy application, like Adobe InDesign, Photoshop 6 (and higher).


Adobe InDesign and OpenType
Adobe InDesign supports the automated features in Open Type fonts via the "Insert Character" function, with alternates available in a fly out from the initial character within the Insert Character dialog/palette. Small caps are supported, as is the combination of the old style and proportional numbers (proportional lining figures and tabular old style figures are not supported, however). All automatic ligatures in an Open Type font are on by default. Finally, formatting text as caps invokes the "case" feature, which is primarily used to shift punctuation to fit better in an all-caps setting; this can be seen as hyphens, dashes, parentheses, braces and brackets shift vertically.


Language support with OpenType
Under Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 Professional, you can simply switch keyboard/language settings, and access the appropriate characters of your wide OpenType fonts in many Windows applications (for NT 4, you need ATM 4.1 or better). Additionally, the NT and Windows 2000 Professional character map accessory is Unicode-aware, and allows you to directly access any glyph that is encoded in the font. To make it easier to use OpenType fonts with applications that support Unicode but not OpenType features, all the glyphs have a Unicode and will show up in the Win NT/2000 character map, allowing direct copy/paste insertion.

Under Windows 95/98 you can switch language settings to get at the different language sections of a wide TrueType font, but ATM 4.1 does not support this functionality for ".otf" OpenType fonts. These operating systems do not fully support Unicode, and the character map will only show a single-byte encoding from an OpenType font. Essentially, an OpenType Pro font in this environment, in a non-OpenType-savvy app, will just function like a regular Type 1 font.

In Mac OS 8 and 9, the support for ".otf" fonts via ATM 4.6 is at the same level as in Windows 95/98. An OpenType Pro font in this environment, in a non-OpenType-savvy app, will just function like a regular Type 1 font. Mac OS 8.5 and higher have a new framework for Unicode support, called Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI), but at this time there are no 3rd-party applications we know supporting ATSUI, and Apple has made no public announcements regarding support for OpenType in an ATSUI framework.


Adobe InDesign's Unicode and language support is independent of the OS. InDesign uses fonts more directly, bypassing some of the standard system functions, in which case the ATM and system-level support may not be necessary.

Import of Unicode text - both Windows and Mac InDesign support import of Unicode text files, and Windows Word files containing Unicode. This makes it possible to import a file with (for example) Romanian, Russian and Greek text into InDesign, even if editing and direct input in these languages is difficult within InDesign. InDesign's Insert Character function allows access to any glyph in the font, like the Windows Charmap accessory.

Keyboard input
-- Under Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 Professional, InDesign supports direct input of Unicode text in different languages with your wide Open Type fonts. You need to activate only the appropriate keyboard driver.
-- Under Windows 95/98, InDesign supports direct input of Unicode text in different languages with your wide Open Type fonts, but only possible if you have installed the font in the InDesign's private "fonts" folder ://... /Adobe/InDesign/Fonts. You will need to activate only the appropriate keyboard driver.
-- In Mac OS 8 and 9 environments, InDesign supports direct input of text only in a single-byte encoding from an Open Type font. Direct input in different languages within InDesign is possible only with single code pages Open Type fonts. You will need to select the font in the appropriate code page - Cyrillic, Central European, Turkish etc. and to install the appropriate System Language Script for Mac OS.

For more information on the software requirements for OpenType support, please refer to the WEB sites of the respective companies.