The shapes of shapes.
A font is a file, and the file has a format. Five of them, told as the Font Wars they came out of — with two exhibits that don't animate the feature, they are the feature.
The locked vault
PostScript Type 11984
Adobe's first outline fonts drew each letter as a cubic Bézier curve — a smooth path defined by a handful of control points rather than a fixed grid of dots, so one file could scale to any size. But the format was encrypted and proprietary. Adobe licensed it for real money, effectively taxing the desktop-publishing revolution it had just started.
It is the format that made digital type possible, kept behind a lock only its owner held the key to.
Today: You mostly meet Type 1 as a museum piece now: Adobe retired support for it in January 2023. The format that started everything no longer opens in the software that made it.
Hover: the pixel grid appears and the control points snap onto it.
The counterattack
TrueType1991
Apple built TrueType specifically to break Adobe's grip, shipped it in System 7 in 1991, and licensed it to Microsoft to make it an industry standard. This standoff is remembered as the Font Wars — and Adobe blinked: in 1990 it published the Type 1 spec and shipped Adobe Type Manager to keep its fonts sharp on screen.
TrueType draws with quadratic curves (one control point per segment instead of two), and it keeps a wild secret: every .ttf contains actual programs. Its hinting instructions — tiny nudges that push outlines onto the pixel grid at small sizes — run in a stack-based virtual machine inside the rasterizer. The font is software.
Today: .ttf is still one of the two files every operating system installs, and its curves live on inside modern OpenType.
The merge you just watched is an OpenType GSUB substitution running live — the browser replacing f + i with a single fi glyph, not an animation of one.
The peace treaty
OpenType1996
Adobe and Microsoft — enemies in the Font Wars — jointly announced OpenType in 1996: one container that can hold either curve flavor, Adobe's cubic CFF or TrueType's quadratic glyf. On top of the outlines it added a layout brain: GSUB and GPOS tables that power ligatures, small caps, and alternate letterforms.
Here is the part people miss: an .otf and a .ttf today are both OpenType. The extension mostly signals which curves are inside; the machinery is the same.
Today: Every font in your browser is OpenType. When ligatures, tabular figures, or small caps toggle on a page, GSUB and GPOS are doing the work.
Hover: the letter is sealed, squeezed, carried across, and unfolded intact.
The diplomatic pouch
WOFF and WOFF22009 to 2014
For years fonts couldn't legally live on the open web: foundries wouldn't license raw .ttf or .otf files that anyone could download and keep. WOFF — designed in 2009 by Erik van Blokland, Tal Leming, and Jonathan Kew, and adopted by browsers from 2010 — is a wrapper: the same font inside, plus compression and room for license metadata.
WOFF2 followed in browsers from around 2014. It swapped WOFF's zlib compression for Google's Brotli, shaving off roughly 30% again. It is the same outlines the foundry drew, folded smaller for the trip.
Today: Nearly every web font today ships as WOFF2 — including Fontduet's own independents wing, where self-hosted faces are served as WOFF2 so the same shapes arrive lighter.
The slider is real: dragging it sets font-variation-settings: 'wght' on live Fraunces — one file, redrawing itself at every stop.
One file, a whole family
Variable fonts2016
Announced jointly by Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft at ATypI Warsaw in September 2016, as part of OpenType 1.8. The idea: an axis like weight stops being a set of separate files and becomes a continuous range inside a single one. Thin, regular, bold, and every step between them live in the same font.
One file can replace a dozen, and the designer can hand you shades they never had to cut by hand.
Today: Most fonts you load from Google Fonts are variable now. A single request can carry a family's whole weight range, and CSS picks any point along it.
Five formats, four decades, one long argument about who owns a letter's shape. The war ended in a shared container — and the pairings across Fontduet all ship inside it.