Frequently Asked Questions About Fonts - File Formats Go to the previous , next chapter. Many different kinds of files are available on the net. These files contain many different kinds of data for many different architectures. In order to save space, most files on the net are compressed in one way or another.
Many archive formats perform compression automatically.
Tar files can contain multiple files and directories. Unlike most archiving programs, tar files are held together in a wrapper but are not automatically compressed by tar. Compression doesn't form a wrapper around multiple files, it simply compresses a single file. As a result, you will frequently see files with the extension .tar. This implies that the files are compressed tar archives.