poka.sh

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TTF

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Font Preview.

At a glance
Original creator Apple
First published 1991
Purpose An outline font format: glyph outlines and the tables that map characters to them, stored in sfnt tables.
Extensions .ttf
Poka parser poka-font
Viewer poka-font-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B2 Broad (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B2 Broad. The common content of the current and the common older versions is decoded. Some named features or versions are not, and are listed.

Confidence: high (the reviewer read the code and a test that proves the claim). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-21 (poka-parsers#454): parsers/poka-font (lib.rs, face.rs, layout.rs, woff.rs, woff2.rs, eot.rs, bitmap.rs). Outlines (glyf, CFF, CFF2) are drawn unhinted by skrifa 0.48 and every specimen line is shaped by harfrust 0.14; the viewer fills the polygons. WOFF 1.0 is inflated per table, WOFF2 decompressed with brotli-decompressor and its glyf, loca and hmtx transforms rebuilt, an uncompressed or XOR-obfuscated EOT unwrapped, and each face of a TTC or OTC gets a tab. tests/samples.rs runs every corpus font and checks each face's family and style names, glyph count and mapped-character count against fontTools 4.66 (42 faces, all equal), that WOFF and WOFF2 draw the same contours as their TTF, and that glyphs were drawn. The corpus has no variable font, PCF, FNT, FON or OTC: variable instances are code reading only, PCF and FNT are checked on hand-built fixtures, and FON and TTC were run once over a Windows Fonts folder (204 of 207 read; the 3 refused are vector FNTs), which cannot be committed. Covers TrueType and OpenType (CFF and CFF2) in sfnt, collections, WOFF, WOFF2, uncompressed EOT, and the bitmap fonts BDF, PCF, Windows FNT 2.0 and 3.0, and NE-format FON.

What Poka does not read

  • hinting is listed, not applied: outlines are drawn unhinted
  • colour glyphs (COLR, CPAL, sbix, CBDT, SVG tables) are listed and the glyphs drawn in one colour; a font whose glyphs are colour bitmaps only is drawn empty, and says so
  • EOT compressed with MicroType Express (MTX) is not decoded: the header's names are shown and no glyph is drawn
  • embedded bitmap strikes (EBDT, CBDT, sbix) in an sfnt are listed, not drawn
  • the grid stops at 2304 cells, and the whole specimen at 400 000 points; the card says when
  • only the first 16 faces of a collection and 16 named instances of a variable font are drawn
  • FNT 1.0, vector FNT and 32-bit PE .fon files are refused with a message
  • PostScript Type 1 (.pfb, .pfa) and Apple .dfont are not routed here

Background

Wikipedia says Apple developed TrueType in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts and released it with Mac System 7 in May 1991. Microsoft's TrueType Open (1994) became OpenType in 1996. Apple's reference manual separates the TrueType outline technology from the sfnt container that other fonts also use. Poka reads the font in wasm with skrifa and shapes the specimen lines with harfrust, then hands the viewer the glyphs' contours as polygons, so no host font engine is involved; the font's names, metrics, features, axes and strikes go to the information card.

Versions

Version Identifier Poka Note
TrueType outlines in an sfnt 0x00010000 or 'true' Not recorded Drawn in wasm by skrifa. The OpenType specification asks for 0x00010000; Apple also allows 'true'.
  • OpenType font (.otf)
  • TrueType Collection (.ttc): Several fonts sharing tables in one file (OpenType specification); one tab per face.

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

Sources