WTF Adobe? My fonts no longer work?

[ButchVA]

I "upgraded" to AI 2024 today, and half of my fonts are gone.  Still in my system (Mac OS Sonoma), just not availalbe in AI.  I have fonts that were custom made for me years (decades) ago that nobody else in the world has that I *have* to have.  So apparently AI no longer supports PostScript fonts?  Thanks a lot Adobe.  You freaking INVENTED PostScript, and I've been using these fonts just fine since the 1990s.  Now suddenly if I want to use the latest version of AI, I'm out of luck?

In addition to running an extortion scheme requiring me to subscribe to get the software, now you're telling me I can't use it the way I need to use it.

I'm ***NOT*** happy right now.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

This step has been announced months ago. You would have needed to keep the old version you were using before and could have continued using that version as long as your system can run it.

Be aware that operating systems and Office software are pushing out Type 1 fonts as well. It's old technology.

There is typedesign software available that can port your fonts, if your contract with the font designers allows it. e.g. https://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype/ 

If PostScript is so dear to you, then why are you using Sonoma? https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death-in-sonoma/ 

[ButchVA]

That's nice.  How would I know that?  

[Monika Gause]

Illustrator has been displaying a warning for quite some time when you opened a file that had PostScript fonts in it. And also about every design publication, blog, company blog and their dogs have been writing about it. It has been discussed in about every Facebook design focused group, reddit and whatnot in a new thread at least monthly. 

[ButchVA]

It has?  Then why is today the first time I'm hearing about it?  Guess again.

[tlmurray23]

If everything you are using -- OS, apps -- is out dated, then no, you would not have not been alerted. The warning came out in 2021. It is not the fault of the makers of the OS or the apps that you did not stay up to date.

[ButchVA]

I've been using AI every single day since 1989, and this is the first I'm hearing about it.  

[ButchVA]

And by the by, the font converter appears not to work in Mac OS 14 Sonoma, so I'm completely dead in the water.

[Monika Gause]

I would assume that Transtype will be available on Sonoma at some time. Maybe ask the company?

As for updating the system and Illustrator and everything, actually. I'm a Mac user myself. I'm seeing Mac users jump onto everything new that Apple pushes out the door whenever they push it. The same goes for updating everything else. Updates have always abandoned stuff. Some driver, some plugin, some extension and also functionality. 

That's why you first have to collect information about things. And then wait a couple months for people find the bugs and the manufacturers iron them out.

I do not know why you did not notice the vanishing of PostScript fonts in Adobe apps. It has been discussed literally everywhere. And it has been in the previous update. So when was the last time you used a PostScript font if you haven't seen that blue message bar until today? https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html

[robert_2869]

I never knew of this and only find out after the fact! I am in the same boat with all my work - all fonts including standard classic fonts missing! Would never have upgraded in 2024 if I had known this! Has ruined my business working on corporate style guides that regularily need updating. 

[Monika Gause]

See Ton's answer below. Tomorrow MAX will start and you know what that means. So you could check whether you can still get an older version.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Soon it may be no longer possible to download a version that supports Type1 fonts and has the old Pantone libraries.  Adobe only provides installers for the current apps and the previous major version of each

[Bobby Henderson]

If you have a large collection of Type 1 fonts I would strongly suggest buying a copy of TransType 4. TransType 4 works on MacOS 10.6-15 Sequoia (Intel & Apple Silicon) and Windows XP-11. There may still be a sale running on it at the FontLab web site. The app is normally priced at $97, but can be had for $39. Use the coupon code: 8TTF24PP

[Bobby Henderson]

I feel your pain. I have a decent collection of Postscript Type 1 fonts, some of which came with boxed Adobe software from the early to mid 1990's. The fonts may be "obsolete" compared to the features in modern OpenType fonts, but they still work alright in the applications that still support them.

Just like Monika said, warnings about T1 font support being removed from Adobe's applications were out there months before it went into effect. It was certainly mentioned here in these forums. There are multiple discussion threads about it.

Apparently the blame for this problem goes to Harfbuzz, a text shaping engine that does not support the old T1 format at all. The term Harfbuzz makes me think of a cat barfing out a hairball laced with house flies. But the technology seems to be some important "under the hood" stuff. So Adobe is ditching support for something it created in order to be compatible with Harfbuzz. Operating systems are removing support for T1 fonts. In the case of Windows the format is not "officially" supported anymore. Yet I can still install T1 fonts on an updated PC running Win10 Pro or Win11 Pro.

Still, the situation is pretty frustrating for any of us long-time Illustrator users. Back in the 1990's it was typical for Adobe's graphics applications to include some decent fonts. Illustrator 4 (for Windows) included Berthold's entire Akzidenz Grotesk "BE" family in its fonts bundle. An OTF replacement for that type family costs over $1000. The Akzidenz Grotesk family has never gone out of style. The ad campaign for the new movie "Killers of the Flower Moon" uses Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended for the title work.

Adobe's 1990's version of PageMaker also had a decent collection of T1 fonts. I remember Illustrator 7 having a decent number of Image Club fonts. It might have been a step down from those Berthold fonts, but they weren't bad either. Font licenses may not permit it, but applications like TransType4 by FontLab Ltd can convert entire folders of T1 fonts into OTF, TTF, etc.

[ButchVA]

I don't look at this forum. I do my work every day. And today was THE first time I've heard ANYTHING about this.  No email from Adobe (that would have killed them?), no pop up messages in AI, nothing. Nada. 

And Adobe is full of crap - older versions (the ones that are available to install) of AI do NOT support PS fonts.  I've installed every older version they have available, and I get the same problem.

Pretty s*itty pool, Adobe.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

You can have multiple versions of Illustrator installed.

I Installed an older version of Illustrator: 2023 (27.0) and that still has support for Type 1 fonts.

In the Creative Cloud app select Apps > All Apps > Illustrator > click the 3 dots …  next to the Open button >  click Other Versions and select 27.0

If the OS does not support Type 1 fonts, you can put them in a folder named Fonts in the Illustrator 27.0 application folder.

[Monika Gause]

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@ButchVA  schrieb:

I don't look at this forum. I do my work every day.

---

It was *everywhere* you looked. design magazines, tech user groups, magazines (yes, the printed ones). Reading magazines, staying on top with tech, design, trends, techniques, people *is* part of the job.

Harfbuzz is needed for a lot of writing systems such as Arabic, Devenagri and many more, used by billions of people. It creates the ligatures (and possibly a lot of other things) - and the use of ligatures in Arabic is quite delicate and somewhat complicated. But Harfbuzz is open source and for years has been kept by mainly one person if I understood that correctly. 

[Jimmy34980859nhoe]

Unfortunately, I think the best bet is looking into and supporting programs that consider the consumer a priority before they make poor choices on updates that ruin peoples ability to work efficiently.

What kind of a system forces updates that don't work, then tell you in a forum you should update the old version and should know better?  It is laughable.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

There's a big difference between saying "Postscript fonts "are going away then the actual truth of its "Type 1 format" is going away. Postscript outline finst continue to exist, but the way they are packaged has changed (i.e OpenType). The old original Type 1 format was created with the old Macintosh two-file format (Screen Font files and Printer Font files) that have not been used by Apple since OS X debuted over 20 years ago. (Windows had their own verion of those in the form of PFB and PFM files.). This is archaic and had to go for many reasons, but were begrudingly supported for years even after OpenType changed everything (also 20 years ago). So, you can totally continue to have your Postscript custom fonts, but you need to convert them to OpenType PS (CFF) format to go forward.

Utilities such as TransType and Font Forge can do this for you very easily, but yes, TransType just recently updated to Ventura compatibly so unless you have access to an older system to run the version they have now, you need to wait a bit.

Anyone who has been in the industry for along time has defintely known about the dirth of Type 1 for a couple of year now, and would also know the dangers of immediately jumping onto a new OS before it's had time to settle in and checking compatibility with any existing production software. That's a risk you took.

As far as Sonoma dumping Postscript, that only affects how the Mac OS deals with Postscript within its own world. All the professional apps and workflows around PS will still continue to work... as will PS printers and their drivers (assuming the printer manufacturers bother to supply versions that work with Sonoma). Apple just decided there's not much call to have an app like, say, Preview to support opening PS or EPS files natively. Not to mention the infrastructure to parse PS or EPS to provide a file preview if one hasn't been provided by the app.

[Bobby Henderson]

If it wasn't bad enough for a Type 1 font to have two files, some of the ones for Windows had three files. There might be an AFM file present in addition to the PFM and PFB files. That was the case for "Fontek" fonts sold as a retail product on floppy discs by Letraset 30 years ago.

Postscript lives on within the OpenType format. But anyone with a collection of Type 1 fonts is seeing that collection of fonts mostly devalued. The user is faced with some tough choices. Buying new OTF versions of those fonts can be ridiculously expensive. Converting existing T1 fonts to OTF could involve legal risks. At least on the Windows platform Type 1 fonts still work in some rival applications like CorelDRAW and Affinity Designer. Type 1 fonts don't work in Inkscape. Monotype has absorbed so many type companies over the past 30+ years (Berthold, ITC, Linotype, etc); they have a massive type library. If I have to consider spending over $1000 for a new copy of Akzidenz Grotesk BE, would it not be a better deal to pay $199 per year for a Monotype type subscription?

EPS files are still commonly used because the format is still widely supported in many graphics applications. I usually see it via customer provided art files. It's an ongoing struggle to educate people about the limits of EPS (such as no transparency effects).

[tlmurray23]

Regarding EPS, Microsoft stopped importing EPS some time ago. Their suggestion is to convert to SVG or EMF; see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/support-for-eps-images-has-been-turned-off-in-office-a069...

[Monika Gause]

In the design field, there is the probability that EPS files have been designed in Illustrator. If so then probably they have been saved in a way that they contain an actual AI file inside them as private data. If you then convert your EPS to SVG or EMF, then you will completely ruin that construction. 

Converting your EPS like that would be such a bad move.

[Bobby Henderson]

Legacy EPS files continue to be supported in various vector graphics applications regardless of what Microsoft or Apple do with their operating systems.

MS Office has never been very good at all at supporting vector graphics formats, such as EPS files. I dislike MS Office so much I refuse to have it installed on my computers. Microsoft tried pushing people to use the Windows Metafile Format (WMF), but there are so many quirks with it that it probably should be called the WTF format. If I have to give someone a graphical item to stick in a Word document I'll usually have better luck just giving them a pixel-based JPEG or PNG image.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

EPS files, being what they were – a package of Postscript instructions – would only work in a PostScript workflow, so even when Microsoft DID allow for the placing of EPS files, if the they didn't have a PS printer, or weren't creating a PDF of their document, they just got the crappy lo-res preview attached to the file (if there was one).

Nowadays, Word on the Mac DOES allow for the placing of PDF files (why the Win version still does not is beyond me), so saving an old EPS logo file as PDF format will do the trick, and will be better than any SVG/WMF/EMF workaround, HOWEVER Word will place it according to the crop box (artboard dimensions) rather than the actual bounding box of the logo artwork, meaning your logo file will have a lot of extraneous white area, unless you also remember to modify the Artboard in Illustrator to "Fit to Artwork Bounds".

Even easier, you can convert an EPS to PDF using Acrobat ... simply opening the file in Acrobat will convert/distill the file to PDF with the bounding box properly set to the artwork bounds already for you, preserving colour mode and any spot colours defined, etc. and assuming any referenced fonts in the EPS are available, either on your system or embedded in the EPS (even Type 1), they will properly embed in the PDF.

[tlmurray23]

Legacy EPS files continue to be supported in various vector graphics applications regardless of what Microsoft or Apple do with their operating systems.

By @Bobby Henderson

Well, yes, but it is not an operating system issue. This is at the application level. When you want clarity at the wide level, you should go with a vector (depending on the graphic, of course).