Stephen,
This is all good infor­mation, and the pdf document gives a great deal of detailed technical infor­mation about OpenType, but the one thing I suspect most users, especially font fans, want to know is what appli­ca­tions are the ones that are “OpenType savvy”? I get questions all the time from people wanting to get Bickham Script’s optional swashes and alternate characters. They see these things used, then buy the font and can’t access them, because they aren’t using an appli­cation that can take advantage of the features built into such fonts. When I tell them that the newer versions of Adobe’s graphics software like InDesign & Illus­trator are the only appli­ca­tions I’ve used that can do this, they are under­standably frustrated. Not everyone who wants to use OT fonts can afford the investment required for those appli­ca­tions.

It’s almost like a hidden secret about OpenType that only profes­sionals can use, and it’s a disservice to the more general user not to tell them up front that they may not be able to use all those great extra characters they wanted when they bought the font.

I admit that I am pretty ignorant on the topic of OpenType-​savvy appli­ca­tions, since I only know those two appli­ca­tions from personal experience. Can you help me and the rest of us out with at least a partial list of appli­ca­tions that would be able to let someone use the more advanced features of these fonts

Thanks

Thank you for your excellent comment, Mike. A majority of our customers are design profes­sionals with access to Adobe’s Creative Suite, so we tend to cater to their needs first, but we certainly shouldn’t forget the hobbiest and casual users.

It frustrates me, too, that Microsoft has yet to fully support OpenType in Office (despite it being a format that they co-​developed!).

Fortu­nately, many of the features are acces­sible to Mac users with the system Character Palette and “Typog­raphy” options in the Cocoa Text Palette.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding more infor­mation about OpenType to FontShop.com, including an outline of which appli­ca­tions support which OpenType features. In the meantime, Adobe has provided a table of their own in their Adobe OpenType Guide.

As of version 10.4 (10.3?), the Mac OS has full OpenType support. This means that any appli­cation that uses the standard OS tools for text and fonts has access to all of the advanced typographic features in OpenType fonts.

If you’re an Office user on the Mac, I think you’re out of luck because Microsoft has imple­mented the text and font handling themselves. But for other appli­ca­tions, including the simple TextEdit, if you have OpenType fonts you can use all of the fun ligatures, swashes and other features your font has.