Photofont

Photofont is a technology for creating bitmap fonts developed by Fontlab Ltd. It is an open-standard font format that uses bitmap glyphs rather than vector outline glyphs. Photofonts can be created without specialized font design software because they are simply collections of PNG graphics defined and organized by an XML file. Details of the XML structure are available at www.photofont.com.

Being composed of raster images, Photofonts can inherently possess any visual effects; the letters could be pictures of anything. PNGs support transparency, including alpha transparency. In contrast, standard vector font formats like TrueType, OpenType and Type 1 define glyph outlines rather than rasterized images, which is why they can be scaled to any size without loss of fidelity. Photofonts cannot support any advanced typographic features and would not, for example, be able to represent Arabic correctly. They also require application-specific plugins. Plugins are currently being developed for Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress and Adobe Dreamweaver.

The following is an example of a Photofont: