I have to admit, it's been years since I last bought a font but have been asked to purchase one for a job we're working on for a client. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in most cases, you should go for OpenType format now, yes?

On the website I've been directed to buy this font from [ www.fonts.com ], I'm given 3 options for OpenType in the download cart...

OpenType Std CFF
OpenType Com TTF
OpenType Pro CFF

...I thought OpenType was just, erm, OpenType! Any ideas what the difference is and which version I should buy? Thanks!

Unless it's for legacy compatibility reasons you should absolutely not be buying fonts in anything other than OTF format.

As for the various types - it's normally to do with which character set you need.

Std is the standard character set pretty much equal to what you got in a typical Western European PostScript Font. CFF stands for Compact Font Format

Com adds support for Eastern European languages. TTF stands for True Type Format. This version tends to be for Windows users.

Pro should contain all the extra characters that the Com version does, and can also include extra character variants.

Generally the Com version supports more languages but Pro will have more typographic variety.

The best way of checking which version you need is to look at the character set which should be provided somewhere on the site. Generally unless you need to set a lot of languages other than English or want the maximum typographic flexibility the Std version will do you.

Thanks for the info, just a bit late (we went for the Std format about a month ago) - no problems reported so that seems to be the correct one for our needs. Thanks for taking the time though!