ISO/IEC 14496-22:2007

Historically, scalable digital fonts have come in two basic flavours: PostScript (registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated) Type 1 and TrueType (trademark of Apple Computer Incorporated). Both of them are multi-platform outline font StandardDetails. OpenType (registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation) is the unification of these two most powerful and widely used font formats, PostScript and TrueType, into a single font format. Designed to handle languages with complex typographic requirements, such as Arabic, it supports alternate glyphs and contextual ligature substitution.

ISO/IEC 14496-22:2007 defines the data format for scalable digital fonts that is based on the OpenType specification, version 1.4.

ISO/IEC 14496-22 addresses the following goals:

• high-quality scaling of glyphs, based on the advanced TrueType hinting capabilities;
• broader multi-platform support;
• better support for international character sets and the Unicode standard;
• better protection for font data using digital signatures in font files;
• smaller file sizes to make font distribution more efficient;
• broader support for advanced typographic features and text layout.