I’m trying to install some postscript fonts from a Mac at work. Our designers do everything on Mac but I work on a PC (XP Professional SP2) and occasionally have to match the fonts that our artists use. From everything I’ve researched, it shouldn’t be impossible to use PS type 1 fonts in Windows, but the ones I get from the designers I can’t install.
I’ve even tried a font-conversion program (CrossFont) that claims to covert this font type to Open type but it crashes when I try to process them.
Is there someway that these font files are just Mac-only? I don’t understand what I need to do to use these fonts in a Windows environment. It’s strange, I’ll have an artist copy font files from her Mac to our network but when I look at them from my PC some of the files say they are 0 bytes. Maybe that gives some kind of hint… Somebody help!
Maybe these will help:
http://www.fonts.com/aboutfonts/fonttechnologies/briefguidefonttechnologies.htm
It looks like the file structure is different on each platform.
Yep, I’m afraid that Mac Type 1 and Windows Type 1 are two slightly different beasts (a bit more info here). If you’re directly copying from a Mac, your computer almost certainly won’t know what to do with the files.
A Windows Type 1 font should consist of two files: a .pfb and a .pfm (Printer Font Binary and Printer Font Metrics, containing shape and spacing information respectively). Do you have both for each font you’re trying to install? If copied from a Mac, I suspect not; you probably have two files without extensions, which are Mac resource files as described in the link above.
There do exist some tools to convert from one to the other, but they’re command-line jobs, and a bit fiddly to install, never mind use. Specifically, the command t1unmac as provided in the LCDF tools should convert from Mac format to Windows - I’ve not used that specific util, but I have used the LCDF suite in general and it seemed sound. 'Fraid that’s the best I can offer, though; that’s not to say there isn’t something better out there, that’s just all I know of.
Many Mac-flavored Type 1 fonts don’t play well in the PC world because they are left over from the time that Mac files had both resource and data forks. You copy one of those files onto a PC that’s not hip to the distinction, you end up with only the data fork (or maybe the resource fork, I don’t remember) which registers as zero bytes since you didn’t get the fork that had the fonty goodness in it.