Announcement – Adobe Ends Support for Type 1 Fonts for Content Editing & Creation

[Dov Isaacs]

Adobe has announced its intention to end support for Type 1 fonts in January 2023. The full announcement may be found at Type 1 Font Announcement. We strongly recommend that any user of Adobe Creative Cloud applications as well as Adobe FrameMaker read this announcement and plan accordingly.

While you can continue using Type 1 fonts until January 2023, we encourage you to explore alternative fonts in the interim so that you can make a smooth transition when support for these fonts is removed.

Some further considerations and clarifications:

(1)    Adobe has already deprecated support for Type 1 fonts in Photoshop in 2021. Microsoft totally eliminated support for Type 1 fonts in Microsoft Office on Windows a number of years ago.

(2)    Type 1 fonts are an integral part of the PostScript and PDF specifications . Neither PostScript nor PDF are affected by this announcement. PostScript, Adobe PDF Print Engine, and Adobe Embedded Print Engine-based RIPs/DFEs and printers will by definition continue to support Type 1 fonts.

(3)    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.

(4)    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.

(5)    The Adobe Fonts service never has supported Type 1 fonts in any manner whatsoever. Thus, if you are using fonts from Adobe Fonts, you are not affected at all by this announcement!

(6)    The announcement applies strictly to new releases beginning in January 2023. It does not affect support for Type 1 fonts in earlier releases. Thus, you can continue to use Type 1 fonts for editing legacy documents after January 2023. Of course, given the continual incompatible operating system updates by Apple for MacOS and increasingly by Microsoft for Windows, the ability to run these older versions may be limited as time goes on. Furthermore, it is possible that Apple and Microsoft may also discontinue support for Type 1 fonts in the future.

The  bottom line is that we are encouraging users of Adobe products to examine existing source documents (i.e., not PDF or EPS with embedded fonts) for use of Type 1 fonts and make appropriate formatting updates as soon as possible to minimize problems beginning in January 2023.

[TikiMonger]

Hi Dov, I've been testing some Type1 fonts in Photoshop CC 2021 and it still loads and seems to work without issue. What exactly should we be expecting with item 1 above? (1) Adobe has already deprecated support for Type 1 fonts in Photoshop in January 2021.

Does this simply mean their support staff won't be able to help if you have issues? I assumed, perhaps in error, that it would mean the fonts would stop working — eg: not load, fail to display, export, lose critical functionality, etc — but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I only ask so I can better understand the time frame I'm dealing with. There's the Jan 2021 date for Photoshop, and 2023 for the other apps (you listed InDesign, Illustrator, and FrameMaker).  We've been trying to move all of our fonts to OT for the past 10 years, but we have some stragglers we need to deal with. 
Thank you for any additional details you can share. 

Laurie

[Dov Isaacs]

Actually, the Photoshop discontinuance of Type 1 support will be sometime in 2021 (I don't know exactly what release or date of same).

Once “support” ends, what you will see (or probably better put not see) are any Type 1 fonts appearing in any lists of available fonts in Photoshop and then later in the other applications as they are released. If you open up content that calls for Type 1 fonts, even if those fonts are “installed” on your system, the application will treat text formatted with said fonts as using unavailable fonts. You will need to then reformat using some other font, preferably an OpenType version of the original Type 1 font. 

[TikiMonger]

Ahh, that explains it.

Thanks so much for the quick reply! 

Laurie

[amy durocher]

@TikiMonger Wanted to circle back, as and FYI, Photoshop 23.0 (October 2021) release no longer supports Type 1 fonts. I wrote a Community article if you would like more info:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/postscript-type-1-font-support-has-co...

[adamtwar]

I work for FontLab, we make the eponymous FontLab pro font editor. We have also created TransType 4, an easy-to-use converter for macOS and Windows. A few days ago I made a video that shows you how you can use TransType to convert your obsolete (but still valuable) Mac or Windows PostScript Type 1 fonts into cross-platform OpenType PS (.otf) fonts: https://youtu.be/j06_QuBwy7Y 

TransType is a good solution if your font’s EULA or your local law allows you to convert the font to a more modern format, and of course if you have Type 1 fonts for which OpenType versions are not available. 

[Carol F Metzger]

Hello Dov. 

You may not remember me, I was Carol F Mason on the old Adobe forums. I'm so happy to see some old familiar names and faces.
I had the complete Adobe Caslon family, but the files have become corrupt and unusable. The new Open Type family only has six basic faces. Do I have any options for the more exotic characters?

Well it finally occurred to me to look at the glyphs. 
I love this font.

C

[Dov Isaacs]

Hi Carol,

Of course I remember you. (Only the name has been changed to protect the innocent?)

And I'm glad you apparently answered your own question. The “exotic characters” (symbols, ornaments, small caps, ligatures, alternatives) are all part of the base fonts now. No need to change typeface to access them. In InDesign and Illustrator, many (such as small caps, old style figures, etc.) can be accessed by applying the appropriate OpenType feature.

[Carol F Metzger]

Sadly, I tried to use a little woodcut pointing hand as a bullet in ID, and it did not work.

[Dov Isaacs]

The Glyphs Pallette is your friend. Select the font name and scroll through all the available glyphs in the particular font to find characters, click on the character, and it is inserted at the current location of your cursor in the text.

That having been said, a “woodcut pointing hand” was never a decorative character in any of the Adobe Caslon fonts, either Type 1 or OpenType CFF format. What font did you have or think you have (or had) which had a woodcut pointing hand?

[Carol F Metzger]

Adobe Caslon Pro Semibold, U+0070, font from Creative Cloud. Used to be part of Old Style Figures and Ornaments. Had to move mouse to take screen shot, it really did say 0070. It appears in AI.

.

[Dov Isaacs]

Guess I considered that style “Victorian” and not “Woodcut” 😁

[Carol F Metzger]

I am confusing it with "wood type ornaments," I know. I am really old now. The brain is so fluid.

[adamtwar]

Unicode and OpenType are great, but there never has been a really good concept on how to put non-text glyphs into an OpenType font. There are two solutions, not of them really good, but they work:  

1. Most font vendors use the PUA (Private Use Area) — a series of Unicode codepoints from U+E000 to U+F8FF, which don’t have any intrinsic meaning except “this is a custom character”. 

2. Adobe also took another approach with their OpenType fonts — they mapped the non-text glyphs to the bullet character or to plain English alphabetic letters, and made them alternates of that character invoked via the “ornm” (Ornaments) feature. This is what you see in Caslon — the way the ornament is stored in the text is: it’s the letter “p” (U+0070) plus the “ornm” OpenType feature. When you insert it from the Glyphs palette, that’s how InDesign stores it. 

None of these solutions are perfect, but that’s what we have. 

[adamtwar]

Ps. And if it said U+0065, then it would have been the letter “e”. I think Adobe did this mainly for the OpenType fonts that had expert or symbol font counterparts in the old Type 1 format, and there, in the Type 1 fonts, these symbols actually used letters like “e” or “p”. So to make the transition from old documents to new ones that would use OpenType, Adobe kept this mapping, but added the “ornm” feature. 

[Carol F Metzger]

Fascinating! Thanks for the info.

[Dov Isaacs]

Note that where a Unicode definition exists for a “special” character such as a symbol, dingbat, etc. the glyph is associated with that Unicode point, not the PUA.

[Tommy Neumaier]

Hello Dov,

Will Adobe's applications like Id, Ps, Ai support OpenType fonts containing PostScript data (CFF) within the OT structure (.otf) as well as OpenType fonts containing TrueType outlines (.ttf)?

Thanks,

Thomas

[Dov Isaacs]

Of course, all Adobe applications will continue to support OpenType CFF fonts as well as OpenType TTF and TrueType fonts. OpenType CFF was and continues to be the replacement for Type 1 fonts.

In fact, you will be seeing increased support for OpenType Variable CFF2 and OpenType SVG CFF fonts as well!

[Tommy Neumaier]

Thank you very much for your quick reply, Dov.

[santhoshr29800103]

Hi,

We are using 3B2 Softwares and we use Open Type and True Type font format for most of the fonts. In addition to this we are using .fnt font. Could you please confirm whether it really makes any impact if we use the above stated fonts after the end of support for Type 1 Postscript fonts by Adobe.

Thanks,

Santhosh

[santhoshr29800103]

Dear Dov Isaacs,

Can you please advise on the above.

Regards,

Santhosh

[Abambo]

Dov retired from Adobe. I doubt that he will still take part in this discussion.

This discussion is only about Adobe retiring the legacy Type 1 font standard. This only means that most of the Adobe applications will stop using and interpreting Type 1 fonts.

Any third-party software may or may not continue to support the font standards they support.

Open Type fonts (OTF) and True Type (TTF) fonts are not impacted by this discussion. Indeed, OTFs make Type 1 fonts obsolete because of the highly extended possibilities that an OTF offers.

[santhoshr29800103]

Thanks for the reply.

[Abambo]

You're welcome.