There are many different kinds of fonts in general use today. Thankfully there seems to be some convergence in this area. Most modern operating systems are now supporting OpenType.
Besides this font specification, which is not supported by BeOS R5, there is also PostScript and TrueType, both of which are supported in various forms in BeOS. There are also bitmap fonts which I don't believe are supported. (Please correct me if you know.) I also don't know about macintosh font types, or old pre-TrueType windows fonts.
Different fonts require different ways of extracting the font information from the file and also can require different ways for FontRendering to the screen.
