From wikipeadia
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple
Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts
used in PostScript. TrueType has become the most common format for
fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating
systems.[citation needed]
The primary strength of TrueType was originally that it offered font
developers a high degree of control over precisely how their fonts are
displayed, right down to particular pixels, at various font sizes.
With widely varying rendering technologies in use today, pixel-level
control is no longer certain in a TrueType font.
Linux and other platforms
The FreeType project of David Turner attempts to create an independent
implementation of the TrueType standard (as well as other font
standards in FreeType 2). FreeType is included in many Linux
distributions.
There were potential patent infringements in FreeType 1 because parts
of the TrueType hinting virtual machine were patented by Apple, a fact
not mentioned in the TrueType standards. (Patent holders who
contribute to standards published by a major standards body such as
ISO are required to disclose the scope of their patents, but TrueType
was not such a standard.) FreeType 2 includes an automatic hinter that
analyzes glyph shapes and attempts to generate hints automatically,
thus avoiding the patented technology.3 The automatic hinter
generally improves the appearance of free or cheap fonts, for which
hinting is often either nonexistent or automatically generated, but it
can degrade the appearance of professional hand-hinted fonts, and does
not work well (or at all) for non-Western text that requires a
different approach to hinting. As a result, some users chose to enable
the patented hinting technology. As of May 2010, all patents related
to bytecode hinting have expired worldwide, so FreeType 2.4 now enables these features >by default.
Is this the same way on ubuntu?
In ubuntu you can install fonts by
- Open the folder where you have downloaded the font file.
- Double click on the font file to open it. This opens a font viewer window.
- On the right there is a button, "Install Font". Click on it.Wait until the button turns to greyed out "Installed".
Are .ttf files standard to store fonts? Or is there another standard on linux?
No ,Gnu/linux uses free types fonts as default , Ubuntu uses it is own font family called ubuntu font family, Even then ubuntu supports other ttf fonts very well