Legacy Document
Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
The Maximum Profile Table
The maximum profile table, with a tag name of'maxp', establishes the memory requirements for a font. Most of the information in this table is for the use of the
font's designer, a font editor that may alter the makeup of the resource, or the
Font Manager itself.Some of the elements in the maximum profile table refer to simple versus component glyphs. A simple glyph is one that is defined as a single equation, such as an "e". A component glyph is a design that the font designer builds by adding a simple glyph to another equation or by adding two glyphs together. For example, the glyph "ê" can be created as a single entity or as a component glyph: the simple glyph "e" plus the simple glyph "^". In this way, a small set of simple glyphs can create a much larger set of component glyphs. The font designer could also design the glyph "ê" as a simple glyph. However, this leads to separate designs for "â", "î", and so on. Some fonts distributed by Apple use component glyphs and some do not.
For more information about this table, see the TrueType Font Format Specification.