what are people doing for fonts?!

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
January 30, 2023
4 replies
714 views

With the resent banishment of T1 fonts, how are people dealing with this?

May of the fonts we use are so old and equipment has been updated, we have no log of what foundries they came from.

It is causing some real issues.

Anmy advice would be welcome

How to

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Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com

Legend

we have no log of what foundries they came from.
By @clairedclarke

That information would be in the font file's metadata — usually part of the copyright information — which you can view in several ways:

Right-Click and look at Properties or Information or Details
Use a font manager to delve into the font's details.

Once you know who owns or developed the font, you can then track down it's current owner. So many of our foundries have been consolidated over the years by Linotype and Monotype. Monotype now owns Linotype itself, as well as Bitstream, URW, and dozens more companies. I wouldn't be surprised if most of your fonts end up now being owned by Monotype.

In one way, that's good because MT probably has created an OpenType version of the font by now.

But on the other hand, you'll pay handsomely for the right to use that font in your work. Be sure to check their licensing requirements and ability to embed the font into a PDF. That's usually in the fine print on Monotype/Linotype's website.

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

Generally, knowing the foundry that a very old font came from probably won't help very much. If you're trying to get a True Type or Open Type version that will behave exactly the same way as the old one in terms of kerning and baseline alignment then you should know that even if you were able to get a new Type 1 version of your old font that foundry adjustments to kerning and tracking tables over the years since you got the old ones would make even those (now unattainable) fonts rag type very differently. In my experience the same named Open Type and True Type versions of Type 1 fonts will look the same in terms of outward appearance but will always have to have adjustments made for kerning and even baseline shifting. By the way, if you see that text has moved up or down in a text frame after replacement I would recommend shifting the text frame to adjust rather than using the baseline shift options in the Control Panel or Character Panel. Baseline shifted text can become annoying to deal with in terms of selection as the selection highlight does not actually match the raised or lowered text any more.

BTW another site that you might look at for new fonts is https://www.whatfontis.com.

rob day

Community Expert

Hi Bill, In my limited testing, TransType worked very well with Type 1 fonts from the 90s. It keeps the font’s metrics and version numer, so there was no need to update via Find/Change Font—InDesign saw the OTF version as the same font..

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

Rob, that sounds very interesting. My only concern would be when the InDesign file is collected for output and sent to a vendor for printing. Licensing concerns for fonts mandate that vendors must have their own license for any fonts collected in order to output them legally for commercial use. It might become complicated to expect a vendor to own the same converted fonts. Or for that matter to expect vendors to go through the same conversion process for possibly whole libraries of fonts (especially when they may well have already removed all Type 1 fonts from their systems). Any vendors who would go through the conversion process would probably pass the expense of the time and effort along to their clients.

rob day

Community Expert

Look into a font converter, TransType seems to work very well:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/ende-der-unterst%C3%BCtzung-f%C3%BCr-ps-type-1-fonts/td-p/11874314

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

It worked very well for me; when I built this new workstation about a year ago, I deliberately did not install any T1 fonts, but went through my collection and selectively converted the (small number) I wanted to keep using.