Photofont

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Photofont is a technology for creating bitmap fonts. Photofont is an open-standard font format that uses bitmap glyphs rather than vector outline glyphs. The font format is simple and easy to create with just a text editor and a graphics program. A font consists of an XML file and a collection of PNG graphics. Details of the XML structure are available at www.photofont.com.

The advantages of photofonts are that they can use color, grayscale and transparency, which vector font formats like TrueType, OpenType and Type 1 cannot. The disadvantage is that, being non-standard, they require plugins to be used in applications. Plugins are currently being developed for Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress, an Adobe Dreamweaver.

Here are some examples of photofonts: