Specifications

Smoother fonts. Thanks to its underlying Quartz technology, Mac OS X makes
text beautiful and easy to read on all displays. A setting in the Appearance system
preference lets you select one of four font-smoothing styles to increase onscreen
readability: Standard (best for CRT displays), Light, Medium (best for flat-panel dis-
plays), and Strong. Sophisticated font-rendering technology with subpixel filtering
also increases effective resolution when fonts are displayed.
Professional typography. Sophisticated typographic capabilities such as kerning and
tracking are no longer limited to professional layout applications. Mac OS X supports
Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) at the system level, so even basic applications such
as TextEdit can take advantage of advanced typographical features, including glyphs.
A glyph can be a single character or a series of characters (a ligature). The “pf” is a ligature, and
the entire font name Zapfino is a single glyph. Notice the different letterforms—how the “p”
changes when followed by “f,” and how each of the letterforms changes in the final glyph.
Advanced font rendering. Apple Type Services (ATS), a key element of the Quartz
graphics and imaging system in Mac OS X, provides resolution-independent font
handling, anti-aliasing, and special anti-aliasing algorithms for LCD screens. ATS allows
third-party developers to build sophisticated typography features into their products.
Mac OS X eliminates the need for ATM Light because its built-in font rasterizer (part
of ATS) works for all font formats, including PostScript and OpenType.
This paper will help you learn more about Mac OS X font technology and show you
how you can use Panther to express your creative ideas better than ever.
4
Technology Tour
Advanced Typography
with Mac OS X