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 (i.e. ), J
or 4).
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 for the character outline and *.pfm 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.