ISO/IEC 14496-22:2007

ISO/IEC 14496-22:2007, "Open Font Format Specification", defines the extensible font data format representation for interchange of digital font information in different multimedia applications.

Historically, scalable digital fonts have come in two basic flavours: PostScript (registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated) Type 1 and TrueType (trademark of Apple Computer Incorporated). Both of them are multi-platform outline font standards. OpenType (registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation) is the unification of these two most powerful and widely used font formats, PostScript and TrueType, into a single font format. Designed to handle languages with complex typographic requirements, such as Arabic, it supports alternate glyphs and contextual ligature substitution.

ISO/IEC 14496-22:2007 defines the data format for scalable digital fonts that is based on the OpenType specification, version 1.4.

ISO/IEC 14496-22 addresses the following goals:

• high-quality scaling of glyphs, based on the advanced TrueType hinting capabilities;
• broader multi-platform support;
• better support for international character sets and the Unicode standard;
• better protection for font data using digital signatures in font files;
• smaller file sizes to make font distribution more efficient;
• broader support for advanced typographic features and text layout.