I have no formal (and precious little informal) graphic design training.
Fairly famous Computer Science person Dr. Donald Knuth long ago developed a font description system called Metafont. In and of itself that's not very interesting, but a thing about Metafont was that fonts could be described such that the production of the font "actuals" (the glyphs in vector form) could yield different letter shapes at different point sizes. For example, serif sizes could change, or thin/thick ratios in Roman fonts could be more dramatic at larger point sizes, etc. Thus you'd make your font description and then generate separate font files at various point sizes to be used for rendering actual documents.
What I'm here to confirm is that vector formats like TrueType, OpenType, or Type1 (really I only care about ttf at the moment) do not have any way of doing that. To be more specific, I'd like to confirm that there's no practical difference between doing one or the other of these two things when I'm adding some text to line art (specifically SVG via Inkscape, but it'd be basically the same question for Illustrator etc):
- based on the context, pick a font size and create the text element so that it's "born" at the right size;
- generate a text element at an arbitrary size, and then resize it as a generic object to adjust it to fit
This probably seems like an insane question but I just realized that it's a nagging "factoid" stuck in my head for like 25 years and I'd just as soon stop worrying.
edit — when I say "resize it" I mean of course to resize while retaining original proportions.
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