OpenType is a cross-platform font format launched by Adobe and Microsoft in the late 1990s and now an international standard. It can hold up to 65,536 glyphs, is built on Unicode encoding and includes advanced typographic features: ligatures, small caps, oldstyle figures, alternates and contextual kerning.
Where to see it
OpenType shows up in the dedicated menu of the Character panel in InDesign or Illustrator, which lists the features available for the selected font. On the web, the same features are enabled with the CSS font-variant or font-feature-settings properties.
Why this detail matters
OpenType has greatly expanded what a font can offer:
- The same file works on both Mac and Windows, which put an end to separate font versions for each system;
- Thanks to Unicode and its thousands of possible glyphs, a single font can cover many languages and writing systems;
- Its advanced features allow careful typesetting, with the right ligatures, the right figures and the right variants, without changing fonts.
Related term
Stylistic sets are groups of alternates provided by the OpenType format to change the look of several glyphs at once.