SFNT is a

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mo ...

file format which can contain other fonts, such as

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

Web Open Font Format The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is a font format for use in web pages. WOFF files are OpenType or TrueType fonts, with format-specific compression applied and additional XML metadata added. The two primary goals are first to distinguish font file ...

(WOFF) fonts and other. SFNT stands for '' spline font'' or ''scalable font'', and was originally developed for TrueType fonts on the Macintosh and used by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

's QuickDraw. SFNT was named after the resource tag the Macintosh used internally to track font data. Many existing font formats are based on the table-based SFNT format, such as

and Open Font Format,

(WOFF), SIL Graphite and many others. SFNT is flexible, extensible and offers an opportunity to introduce additional table structures when needed, in a way that would not affect existing font rendering engines and text layout implementations. However, due to the limitation of SFNT system, a maximum number of 16 = 65536 can be put in one font ''table''. This limitation is partially overcome in the derived formats using "

Collections", formerly known as "TrueType collections", so that a file can contain multiple fonts with up to 65536 characters.

References

{{Digital-typography-stub Font formats

See also

References