WTF Adobe? My fonts no longer work?

Whether it was announced months ago is not the point. I hate when PR people give answers that "pretend" to solve the problem but don't even answer the question. We have all of this technology available to us (yay...?)... yet a company of this size cannot manage the earlier fonts? No. It's not an issue of can't... it's that they won't. So what is the motivation? Certainly you would not be taking my documents and feeding it into an AI, right? As in harvesting my data without my consent?

ANY real art director has an archive of their favorite fonts from REAL foundries. Assets we invested in and used for many years. Unique to us. Now Adobe is cornering the market and eliminating all fonts that they are not supporting or you are buying. UTTER RUBBISH. Thanks Adobe, moving everyone to the design for dummies Epress and throwing away our years of typographical prowess just so everyone can design. Does anyone have a solution as to how to load older fonts and use them in the current Creative Cloud?

I'm retire but work on the occasional logo. It's been a few months since I've touched Illustrator but started on a new logo today and saw a shitload of my reliable fonts gone. I tried to find some to download from Adobe and not there. And their search feature is horrible. And I never saw a peep about this either. I feel your pain. 

Same thing happened to people at my company and I just don't understand why Adobe would update new options that were not chosen about reading font.  

We can see the different fonts, but after combining files it prints the copies with wingding-like boxes that only read a few letters and replace the rest with rectangles.

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.

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.

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/