When every bit of performance and efficiency counts, D-Type fonts provide the extra boost that highly competitive applications need.

Overview

If you are using D-Type Font Engine or D-Type PowerDoc Engine to render text, it makes sense to store your fonts in D-Type format. D-Type fonts are more versatile and more compact than existing commonly used font formats, such as TypeType, OpenType, Type 1 and even Adobe's CFF (Compact Font Format). They can also proivide the extra perfromance boost for your applications. The conversion to D-Type format can be done very easily using D-Type Font Converter.

Features

D-Type font format is feature rich. Every single feature that is available in existing commonly used font formats is also available in D-Type. However, D-Type font format is more compact, more sophisticated and less redundant than any existing font format on the market today. It is the principal format developed for D-Type Font Engine, the next generation scalable font technology.

Feature Comparison With Major Font Formats

File Size

In the following section we show how compact and efficient D-Type font format is. We compare the size of 8 randomly chosen fonts in TrueType, Type 1 and CFF (Compact Font Format) with D-Type. We also show the size of each font when compressed using a conventional ZIP compressor. This helps illustrate how efficient each format is. For example, if a 90 KB font file can be compressed to a 46 KB ZIP file, then its efficiency is only about 51% (or 100 * 46 / 90), which is not very high. If, however, a 90 KB font file can be compressed to an 85 KB ZIP file, then its efficiency is about 94% (or 100 * 85 / 90), which is very high. When the efficiency is so high, not much additional reduction in size can be gained by compressing the original font file. In other words, the font file is already highly compact. The tests we ran below show that fonts converted from TypeType/OpenType, Type 1 and CFF format to D-Type are always extremely compact and their efficiency is consistently very high, around 90% on an average.

It is also interesting to note that the efficiency of TrueType/OpenType, probably the most commonly used format today, is quite low, around 58%. More importantly, by converting TrueType/OpenType to D-Type fonts, it is possible to reduce their file size almost 3 times!

TrueType/OpenType vs D-Type

Note: Testing performed by D-Type Solutions in February 2012.

Conclusions

• The efficiency of the TrueType/OpenType format is pretty low, around 58% on an average. In most cases the original file size is two times the size of the compressed file.
• The efficiency of the D-Type format is very high, always more than 85% and sometimes as high as 92%. In most cases the original file size is very close to the compressed size. In other words not much additional reduction in size can be gained by compressing the original font file. This is in sharp contrast with the TrueType/OpenType format.
• On an average, D-Type fonts are almost 3 times smaller in size than the corresponding TrueType/OpenType files.

Type 1 vs D-Type

Note: Testing performed by D-Type Solutions in February 2012.

Conclusions

• The efficiency of the Type 1 format is consistently very high, around 96% on an average. In most cases the original file size is very close to the compressed size. However, Type 1 fonts cannot have more than 256 glyphs.
• The efficiency of the D-Type format is also very high and consistent, around 91% on an average (about 5% less than with Type 1). However, D-Type fonts are not limited to 256 glyphs.
• On an average, D-Type fonts are more than 2 times smaller in size than the corresponding Type 1 files.

CFF vs D-Type

Note: Testing performed by D-Type Solutions in February 2012.

Conclusions

• The efficiency of the CFF format varies from as low as 46% to as high as 88%.
• The efficiency of the D-Type format is consistently very high, around 90% on an average. In some extreme cases it approaches 97%. This means that is is simply not possible to compress the file size much further using the conventional ZIP compressors.
• On an average, D-Type fonts are more than 1.3 times smaller in size than the corresponding CFF files.