No, no risk involved. Remember that TrueType was originally developed by Apple.

Bruno Maag
Dalton Maag Ltd

On that note, why is it that major magazine publishers such as Wenner state in their file specs to avoid TT? If you use their DDAPv3 driver and distiller preset, does font type matter? Just curious.

>On that note, why is it that major magazine publishers such as Wenner state in their file specs to avoid TT?

Habit

>If you use their DDAPv3 driver and distiller preset, does font type matter? Just curious.

Anyone heard of a printer or publisher rejecting a PDF because it contains an embedded TrueType font?

Another way of looking at this though, is that Windows fonts are relatively untested on Mac OS. If a font developer is developing a “Windows” TrueType font, they may not bother testing to see if it works properly on Mac OS. This may be particularly true for greymarket/free fonts, which I’ve experienced problems with. In the case of legacy font files, I’m not sure there is anyone necessarily at fault. It may be that the font worked fine on the OS for which it was intended.

In general, if the font was built according to spec, it should work. However, I think it is perfectly rational for for a printer to want to avoid them. Licensed fonts from major foundries are not likely to be the problem, of course.

A TrueType font must contain a ‘cmap’ table for the platform you want to use. In the old days, this meant that a TrueType font that only had a Windows ‘cmap’ table would not work on Mac OS and vice-versa, because without that table, the OS couldn’t figure out how to map characters to glyphs in the font.

These days, almost all recent-vintage fonts have Unicode ‘cmap’ tables, and current versions of both Windows and Mac OS X know how to use them. However, older programs may not react well to fonts that are missing the ‘cmap’ for your particular text encoding. In general, though, if it looks like the font is working, it’s working. Just keep these things in mind (for example, if you send a job using such a font out for printing, then if the printer is using an older OS or older version of the program, you may run into difficulties).

Indeed many magazine specify that TT fonts are not accepted. I haven’t tested any of them to see if they were kidding (probably not a wise idea). If you outline them how are they going to know? Do True Type fonts have hinting? If not, convert to outlines and be done with it…
peace

It is a sad commentary on the PostScript FUD in the world that, 15 years after TrueType 1.0, people don’t realize that it has far more powerful hinting capabilities than Type 1.

(All of which work completely on any PostScript 3 printer, and on many Level 2 devices as well.)

If there’s hinting, then outlines of small sizes is not a very good idea. But I just wouldn’t start sending them to mags whose specs say not to use them. I never use True Type for this reason. Of course I don’t use Type 1 much anymore either…
peace