Font converter

Hi,

Speaking as a font production geek who has dealt with this issue a lot, I have a number of thoughts.

1) Why do you need to convert the font in the first place? When you write "PC fonts," do you mean TTF TrueType fonts? A few things to be aware of:

- Windows TTFs are already legal and functional fonts on the Mac as well

- OpenType fonts can have TrueType outlines and use the TTF extension

- The "difference" between plain TrueType and OpenType TrueType is one of degree and added features. Very few of these features can be added automatically by converting the fonts (also true when converting TTF > OTF).

2) In most cases, the license terms of the fonts do not allow such conversions. Adobe is an exception, but few other commercial fonts allow it.

3) Any homebrew conversion you do will almost certainly yield fonts which are not identical with the "equivalent" OpenType fonts from the original foundry. If you will be working with other people in your workflows who are using those fonts, that could be a problem. Among other things, the names will typically differ.

4) If you aren't already a font geek, using a tool such as FontLab to do the conversion may not help much, because you won't know what things to change. Plus it costs hundreds of dollars more. For the non-expert, you are probably better off using an automated conversion tool which has reasonable default settings. I've been pretty happy with TransType (which is from the folks who make FontLab), but FontXChange is from a partner of ours (FontGear) with a long history of sophisticated font tools, so I expect it is a fine product as well.

5) As Michael says, if the input fonts are PostScript Type 1, or for that matter just badly made, there may be related issues with the conversion. I have rarely seen such issues unless the input font has an especially non-standard character set. For example, if you have a font that essentially "lies" about the characters or encoding, that will not likely convert properly to Unicode.

Cheers,

T

Thomas Phinney

Sr Product Mgr, Fonts & Typography

Extensis, a division of Celartem Inc.

Kristie,

Apart from legal issues, just recently someone had major problems with a converted font, especially with non-ASCII characters. If the old font you plan to convert are from the old PostScript days, they do not contain any Unicode information, and modern font requires this information to work seamlessly in all applications. Therefore all converters have to rely on mapping tables or best guesses. Only one glitch in the original font may break the result. And think about it, if you convert it yourself, there is no one you can go to and complain (… ask for a fix, I meant to say).

If you have to move a font into a more modern format, I would rather recommend to use a font editor (Type Tool, Fontographer, FontLab), because with such a tool you may be able to fix certain things that may go wrong.

- Michael