ttf

TTF stands for TrueType Font, a font file format developed by Apple Computer in the 1980s and later adopted widely by Microsoft and other platform developers. It is a scalable font format designed to render high-quality type at various sizes and resolutions, while aiming to provide consistent results across different graphics subsystems.

TrueType fonts encode glyph outlines using quadratic Bézier curves and include an instruction set for hinting, which guides rasterizers to improve legibility at small sizes. The format is part of the SFNT family, a common container that stores glyph data, metrics, and metadata in a structured set of tables such as cmap, glyf, head, hhea, hmtx, maxp, and name. This structure enables efficient rendering, font metrics, licensing information, and language support.

In practice, .ttf files are widely used across operating systems and applications, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile platforms. They support a broad range of languages via Unicode mappings and can be embedded in documents or used in digital typography and web design. A related extension, TTC for TrueType Collections, allows multiple TrueType fonts to be packaged in a single file, identified by a tcff table marker, which helps manage font families and reduce file counts.

Over time, TrueType coexisted with and influenced newer formats such as OpenType, which can encapsulate TrueType outlines or PostScript outlines depending on the vendor’s implementation. Today, TrueType remains a foundational and widely supported font format for desktop and embedded systems, valued for its portability and broad compatibility.