The name OpenType was chosen for the combined technologies, and the technology was announced later that year.Īdobe and Microsoft continued to develop and refine OpenType over the next decade. Needing a more expressive font format to handle fine typography and the complex behavior of many of the world's writing systems, the two companies combined the underlying technologies of both formats and added new extensions intended to address those formats' limitations. These efforts were intended by Microsoft and Adobe to supersede both Apple's TrueType and Adobe's Type 1 (' PostScript') font formats. Adobe joined Microsoft in those efforts in 1996, adding support for the glyph outline technology used in its Type 1 fonts. Those negotiations failed, motivating Microsoft to forge ahead with its own technology, dubbed 'TrueType Open' in 1994. OpenType's origins date to Microsoft's attempt to license Apple's advanced typography technology GX Typography in the early 1990s.
