Support for authoring with PostScript Type 1 fonts to end by January 2023

[HARSHIKA_VERMA]

PostScript Type 1 fonts announcement:

Adobe will end support for authoring with PostScript Type 1 fonts by January 2023. This FAQ article details the changes and what they mean for your projects.

The Adobe Fonts service will not be affected by this change. Fonts activated from Adobe Fonts will continue to be supported everywhere you use them now. Any OpenType or TrueType fonts you have installed on your machine will continue to be supported as well. Note that operating systems are currently moving towards supporting the more robust technical possibilities of OpenType format fonts, and ending support for the Type 1 format. Most browsers and mobile operating systems currently do not support Type 1 fonts.

 Related Links:

PostScript Type 1 fonts end of support FAQ's

Type 1 Font support | End of Life

PostScript Type 1 fonts: End of support in Photoshop 23.0

[Dov Isaacs]

On behalf of Adobe, some clarifications:

(1)    It is unfortunate that the wording Type 1 fonts (PostScript) was used in the above posting. Type 1 fonts are an integral part of the PDF specification as well. Neither PostScript nor PDF are affected by this. PostScript, Adobe PDF Print Engine, and Adobe Embedded Print Engine-based RIPs/DFEs and printers will by definition continue to support Type 1 fonts.

(2)    Adobe PDF-based products including Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Acrobat Standard, Adobe Acrobat Pro, and the Adobe Mobile Readers (iOS and Android) will continue to support the display, printing, and text editing of PDF files using Type 1 fonts. This is required by the ISO PDF specification.

(3)    Even with the deprecation of Type 1 font support in applications such as InDesign, Illustrator, and FrameMaker in January 2023, you will still be able to place EPS and PDF content with embedded Type 1 fonts into these application documents and subsequently be able to display, print, and export PDF content from same.

(4)    The Adobe Fonts service never has supported Type 1 fonts at all. Thus, if you are using fonts from Adobe Fonts, you are not affected at all.

[tysont83032995]

I have written the following to document my reaction to this announcement:

Greetings Harshika - I'm writing out of concern for the newly announced policy regarding support for Type1 fonts. Designers like me, with decades of experience and an appreciation for typography, have gone to lengths to build font collections that are curated and reflect our personal design philosophies and aesthetic. Many of these aren't Adobe-owned fonts, and many are indeed Type 1 formats. Your rationale for the change is frankly nonsensical. Type 1 formats are perfectly suited to print applications now, and into the distant future, and only become obsolete if Adobe forces them to become so. I will state this clearly - many designers consider themselves to be print designers. PRINT IS NOT DEAD. Adobe's move away from Type 1 fonts will move the design industry towards the middle eliminating a key tool that designers today can leverage to create distinct work. In the middle, design becomes less valuable to business, and the industry at large, as it starts looking more and more alike. Please reconsider this illogical, and insensitive assault on the design industry. 

[HARSHIKA_VERMA]

Thanks for the clarification, Dov, and for explaining it in a better way. I really appreciate your collaboration with this post. I have renamed the title of the post and also some more edits which might make more sense now.

Please let me know if you think any more changes are required. 

Thanks,

Harshika

[defaultqgf7pmiepmbv]

Regarding "Adobe has planned to end support for authoring with Type 1 fonts (PostScript) in January 2023":

In planning my upgrade path to replacing unsupported Type 1 fonts, I have in my Type 1 font library the entire family of Adobe-issued Poetica fonts. Yet in looking up OpenType replacements on the Adobe Fonts website, I find Adobe no longer offers this entire font family. Needless to say, I use Poetica Ornaments, Swash Caps, Ligatures, etc. in several of my legacy publications. Signed, Perplexed.

[Dov Isaacs]

Dear Perplexed,

The answer is very, very simple.

Part of the benefit of OpenType is that all the characters that were in the Poetica family are now in one single typeface, Unicode-encoded. This is optimized for use in OpenType / Unicode cognizant software such as InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

See the attached PDF file showing all the characters available in the Poetica font!

Hopefully this eliminates your fears and perplexion!

[defaultqgf7pmiepmbv]

Thanks so much for your prompt reply, Dov. "Perplexed" is now feeling a bit more relieved. But a couple of questions remain.

First, I'm picking on Poetica because it is probably the most robust and complex of the fonts offered by Adobe. I purchased the set back in 1992 when buying fonts was like buying new software (the Poetica package, delivered in the mail, even came with an extraordinary 64-page booklet with complete character lists and brilliant graphic examples). Your Poetica font page (fonts.adobe.com/fonts/poetica) does not offer the PDF you furnished, and makes no mention of the 20 unique font variants contained within the font, so maybe you're taking for granted that everyone will know the depth of fonts available in the Poetica family? When I browse over to Minion (fonts.adobe.com/fonts/minion) -- another font I will need to update -- the page lists and displays all varients of the font, which is a bit more helpful (based on your post, I'm going to assume Minion Ornaments is also included in Minion, though this varient is not displayed). So I expect some old-timers like me will wade into the forthcoming 2023 typography changes with trepidation.

Second, the PDF you furnished does not make clear how I will substitute my old Poetica Type 1 fonts with the OpenType fonts in my documents. Will the InDesign "Find/Replace Font" dialog flag and take care of this, or will I have to wade through my documents and manually search and replace the old fonts?

Finally, I still miss "Adobe Type Manager". Managing fonts using the Windows Control Panel is a nightmare!

Thanks very much for your time.

[Dov Isaacs]

It really was wonderful when the Adobe Originals fonts were packaged with full and proper documentation, showing off use cases, etc. Many of us who have been at Adobe quite a while fondly remember those days and strongly wish that such collateral would still be made available, albeit probably as PDF files.

Yes, I had to use a third party application to produce the character chart for you. You are not the only Adobe customer who longs for such a full and precise presentation of the full glyph complement (and their Unicode values) for each font we offer.

In terms of Minion and any other fonts that had either ornaments, small caps, old style figures, swash, ligatures, and alternate character styles as separate typefaces, all those have been merged into the base font. The distinct fonts that remain with OpenType differentiate between roman versus italic, weight (thin, light, regular, semibold, bold, black, etc.), and width (condensed, semicondensed, normal, expanded, etc.).

I assume (based on your response) that your documents are in fact authored in InDesign. How easy it will be (or not) to transition from Type 1 Poetica to OpenType Poetica Std highly depends on your discipline in using paragraph and character styles. If for example, you used character styles to override paragraph styles to access the special fonts for small caps and old style figures, “converting” a document, possibly via changing your character style definitions first and then applying a more general find/replace will potentially be much easier than if you bypassed use of or inconsistency used both paragraph and character styles. Neither I nor anyone else would be meshuga enough to tell you that this is simple. It absolutely isn't! 

That having been said, when InDesign was first released back in the Summer of 1999 (I helped test InDesign 1.0 before its release), we also released the first OpenType CFF fonts including Minion Pro and Myriad Pro. InDesign was designed and engineered specifically for Unicode-based OpenType font technology. We stopped marketing Type 1 versions of our type library around 2003. Other font foundries / vendors likewise discontinued licensing of Type 1 fonts in the same timeframe. For what it is worth, I would be surprised if the majority of today's graphic artists using InDesign and Illustrator, for example, have never even used a Type 1 font. They take OpenType font features pretty much for granted. (Yes, I know that doesn't help YOU or anyone in your situation!)

With regards to ATM (not the automated teller machine, but Adobe Type Manager), the real purpose behind that software was to allow use of Type 1 fonts natively, originally on MacOS (prior to MacOS 10) and Windows (prior to Windows 2000). Once support for Type 1 fonts was included natively, within the operating systems and Type 1 Multiple Master fonts were discontinued, there was no real purpose for Adobe to continue distribution of the free version of ATM. The “deluxe” version of ATM had only very rudimentary font management capabilities and the feedback we got from our graphic arts customer base was that their font management requirements went well beyond what ATM provided and that third party font managers were already doing an excellent job of providing that functionality. C'est la vie! If it makes you feel any better, I have no love for Windows' Font Control Panel; there are actually two different versions of that in the recent releases of Windows 10; both cruddy! And the native MacOS FontBook utility isn't much better.

(By the way, I am not part of Adobe's Type Development organization although I do collaborate with them quite regularly.)

Good luck on your conversion project(s)!

[glennf60468766]

Thank you for htte heads-up regarding the ending support for Type 1 fonts in January 2023. It should provide enough time to find replacements for most widely used typefaces. In the short-term, I've been looking for 2 very common fonts in OTF and Adobe doesn't appear to have them. I'm looking for OTF versions of Symbol and Times New Roman. How and where are designers going to find replacements for all our old fonts if Adobe doesn't offer them?

[Dov Isaacs]

Although there was a Type 1 version of Symbol, Adobe never provided a Type 1 version of Times New Roman.

However, both Windows and MacOS have a TrueType version of Symbol and an OpenType TTF version of all members of the Times New Roman family.

For these fonts, you should be “good to go” …  😉

[glennf60468766]

Thank you for responding. You haven't answered my question. I don't need Type 1 versions of Symbol and Times New Roman, I need OTF versions of the fonts. I need to know where I can find OTF versions of these fonts if they are available.

[Dov Isaacs]

I did answer your question. The system-provided versions of Times New Roman are indeed OpenType fonts (their file names have a .ttf suffix, but they are OpenType TTF fonts which are perfectly acceptable for you needs). And the system-provided version of Symbol is a TrueType font that is a perfect replacement for the Type 1 Symbol font and is fully compatible with what you previously used in your applications, whether those applications of word processors (such as Word), spreadsheets, or graphic arts software (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.).

[Lafil Design]

Hello, I'm writing because my logo and all my corporate identity is also created with Bauer Bodoni Roman. I tryed to replace it with some others Bodoni fonts, but I can't find anything perfect (for example for the "fi" combined and not "f" and "i").

Can you help me?

Is there a replacement?

Thank you so much.

Sara

[Dov Isaacs]

The easy part is finding other “Bodoni” fonts or at least fonts that have the word “Bodoni” as part of the font name! 😉 A Google search can find those. A “genuine” Bauer Bodoni can be found at https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/bauer-bodoni/ for example. In fact, that particular font should much totally match what you currently have in Type 1 format (if you originally licensed the Type 1 font from Adobe or Linotype) but now in OpenType CFF format.

You mention ligatures. Be aware that for OpenType treats ligatures very differently. The particular ligature you specified, ‘fi’, is in that font but in programs such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, it is accessed either by enabling automatic OpenType ligatures (the preferred method) or by accessing the glyph explicitly and manually via the Glyphs Panel of those applications (the hard way).

[Lafil Design]

Thank you!!!
I searched on Adobe fonts but I didn’t find it 🙈

I immediately bought it.


Thanks

Enjoy your day,
Sara

[Dov Isaacs]

Sorry, but I didn't say or imply that Bauer Bodoni was available via the Adobe Fonts service.

[stiano]

Will Adobe be upgrading Postscript 1 fonts to OpenType versions? And will they be available with a Creative Cloud subscription, as fonts currently are available?

[Dov Isaacs]

@stiano,

You posted this to the Adobe Fonts community and as such, I will assume that your concern is about Type 1 fonts available via the Adobe Fonts service.

The fact is that the Adobe Fonts service never offered any Type 1 fonts at all. Most of the fonts offered by Adobe Fonts are OpenType CFF fonts with the remainder being OpenType TTF fonts. Thus, fonts that you have been using via Adobe Fonts, this announcement has no impact whatsoever on you.

If your concern is about Type 1 fonts previously and separately marketed by Adobe prior to the early 2000's (i.e., over 15 years ago), all the Type 1 fonts that were classified as Adobe Originals (i.e., commissioned by Adobe and created by Adobe staff and direct contractors for Adobe) are available in OpenType CFF format via Adobe Fonts. Other Type 1 fonts that were marketed by Adobe from third parties (such as Linotype, Monotype, ITC, etc.) are available in OpenType CFF format via the Adobe Font Folio 11.1 product (not part of the Adobe Fonts service) or directly from the foundry that originally created the font (you can try fontspring.com, myfonts.com, etc.).

[art_enthusiast]

This will cost me a fortune to replace my beloved font libary that I worked so hard to research, accumulate, and pay for.

Thoughtless.

TRN.