Comment by viggity

I work for a major foundry and fonts are ludicrously complex for a ton of reasons, but for the most part TTFs use quadratics, but our designers exclusively use cubics (postscript outlines) at design time and there is a conversion process to fit them as quadratics. On ultra lowend devices, having quadratics renders faster and the hinting works better, but if you're a designer consuming fonts, you should stick with OTFs as it is what the designer intended.