PostScript Type 1 fonts were originally developed by Adobe Systems for use in PostScript printers.
PostScript Type 1 fonts are outline fonts. They use lines and cubic
Bézier curves to define letter shapes or “glyphs”. A “glyph” is the shape in a font that
is used to represent a character code on screen or paper. Examples of glyphs are the
letters of the alphabet or the symbols in a font like ITC ZapfDingbats
( 
).
Type 1 fonts have the following characteristics:
- They are smaller in file size than TrueType fonts, which means that they occupy less space on your system’s hard disk.
- Being outline fonts, Type 1 fonts are scalable to almost any size. They remain sharp and smooth on any platform and in print, and their legibility remains good, even when printed at small point sizes on low-resolution laser printers.
- PostScript Type 1 fonts are commonly used in professional publishing environments and are supported by most high-end output devices, because most of these devices use PostScript as their page description language.
- A PostScript Type 1 font is stored in two separate files: one which contains the character outlines and one which contains the font metric data. In Microsoft Windows, you can recognize these by their extensions: *.pfb (Printer Font Binary file) for the character outline and *.pfm (Printer Font Metrics file) for the one containing the metric data. The former (.pfb) is commonly called the printer font, the latter (.pfm) is also known as the screen font. The combined file size of both files, however, is smaller than the file size of its TrueType counterpart. The file size of the PostScript font may sometimes even be as little as half of the size of the corresponding TrueType font.
- You can recognize a PostScript Type 1 font by the following icons:
