Type 1 fonts issue with MS Office 2019 / Windows 10

[AVoelp]

Dear Community:

I use MS Windows 10 (1903) 64-bit (German localized version) with several Type 1 fonts installed. While I had no problems installing these fonts, and they work well with most of my applications, there seems to be an issue with MS Office 2019:

• In Word and PowerPoint, Type 1 fonts appear in the font selection dialog, and the preview in the dialog looks perfectly all right. However, when I use a Type 1 font on my text, the display on the screen is corrupted (the Type 1 fonts are replaced by some other font but the character width does not match). Print-outs of the same documents are o.k.
• In Excel and Visio, Type 1 fonts are missing in the font selection dialog. However, when I open a document to which these fonts have already been assigned (on another machine with Windows 7 / Office 2010), they display and print all right.
• Publisher and Access appear to have no issues with Type 1 fonts (everything works as expected).

Any ideas about how I can get my Type 1 fonts working again in all Office 2019 applications? If this involves converting my Type 1 fonts to OpenType or TrueType, is there an "official" converter provided by Adobe? And, most importantly, is there a way of converting my Type 1 fonts (or buying the current OTF version of these fonts) so that they will replace the old Type 1 fonts in my documents automatically (I want to avoid having to re-assign the fonts in my legacy documents)?

Regards, Andreas

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Microsoft ended all support for use of Type 1 fonts beginning with Office 2013 under Windows (all versions). Any existing content formatted with a Type 1 font is now displayed (and often printed) using a substitution font (and not necessarily what you might expect). Currently, Microsoft applications support TrueType, OpenType TrueType, and OpenType CFF (OpenType with Type 1 outlines) fonts. This decision was Microsoft's and absolutely not Adobe's!

Ironically, Microsoft still supports Type 1 fonts under MacOS.

Adobe does not provide any software (“official” or otherwise) for converting existing Type 1 fonts to any other format including OpenType CFF. There are some third party applications that purport to do this, although you should be aware that often these “converters” are somewhat lossy in terms of losing the “hinting” that provides proper rendition at small magnifications as well as some font metrics. Also important to understand is that many font vendors specifically have restrictions in their EULAs (End User License Agreements) against modifying fonts or converting to other formats for any fonts you have licensed from them.

OpenType fonts have been the official replacement for Type 1 fonts from Adobe for over 20 years now. The full Adobe Type Library as provided in our Font Folio product was reissued in OpenType CFF format many years ago and is still available from Adobe. Adobe no longer directly licenses the fonts in the Font Folio individually. If you wish to license any of the “Adobe Originals” fonts (such as Adobe Garamond Pro, Adobe Caslon, Trajan Pro, Letter Gothic Std, or Critter Std), you can license them via https://www.fontspring.com/foundry/adobe. If you are a licensee of the Adobe Creative Cloud, you also have access to an extensive collection of fonts (including the “Adobe Originals”) through the Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit) cloud service.

However, it is important to note that all Adobe font names were slightly modified in moving to OpenType CFF. For example, Courier is now Courier Std and Adobe Garamond is now Adobe Garamond Pro. Std represents fonts with more restricted character sets and features. Pro represents fonts with much more extensive complements of glyphs (additional character sets such as Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and/or Arabic) and OpenType features (automatic support for small caps, old style figures, ligatures, etc.). Although we did try to maintain upward compatibility of font metrics going from the Type 1 versions of a font to the equivalent OpenType CFF versions, we could not guarantee exact compatibility. As such, we decided (I was part of that decision 20 years ago) to make the OpenType CFF fonts have a slightly different name – the Std and Pro suffixes were a convenient way of doing that.

The bad news is that there no way of automatically replacing the Type 1 fonts in your Microsoft Office documents with the OpenType equivalents. If you use “styles” in your Office documents, it won't be that difficult; you update the styles. But since there is likely to be some re-layout as you change from the Type 1 to the OpenType fonts, you might need to make some adjustments in the Office documents themselves. (Conceivably, you might be able to create some Visual Basic scripts to do font replacement, but this might be somewhat time consuming to create, test, and run – and you'd still want/need to check the final results!)

Sorry, but this isn't as simple and it is most unfortunate that Microsoft, without prior notice, decided to yank Type 1 support from Office on Windows. Just consider yourself fortunate that you weren't using Type 1 Multiple Master fonts – support for that format only exists internally within Acrobat – not even Adobe layout applications support those anymore.

               - Dov

[steve10100]

Lieber Andreas,

If I may add to the very informative answer above:

It is my understanding that the Adobe EULA permits the conversion of Type 1 fonts from the Adobe Type Library to OpenType format, as long as these are not otherwise modified.

From my own experience I can confirm that conversions from PC/Windows-Type 1 to OpenTypeCFF are lossless in so far as the metrics are identical and thus reflow is avoided.

There is free software with which you can achieve this, FontForge, for example. Unofficially, a utility called “Adobe OpenType Converter” will also do the job. Commercial products like FontLab Studio can be worthwhile if you have a large number of Type 1 fonts and want to avoid the expenditure of relicensing dozens of nearly identical fonts.

PM me if you need further advice.

Gruß,

Steve.

(Ich spreche übrigens auch deutsch)

[Dov Isaacs]

In terms of fonts in the Adobe Type Library licensed as part of the Font Folio products or individually directly from Adobe (or more recently from FontSpring, the End User License Agreement does permit such conversions of Type 1 to OpenType per section 14.7.4 (see attached PDF file of EULA). If you acquired the Type 1 font via Monotype or other vendors, their EULA prevails which usually isn't nearly as liberal.

You should be aware that for non-Adobe fonts, the EULAs are often quite draconian in terms of what you are allowed to do with fonts in terms of any modifications either of glyph designs, font formats, etc.

I also advise that you look at Migrating from Type 1 to OpenType Fonts | Adobe Type  which gives an excellent overview of Adobe's transition from Type 1 fonts to OpenType CFF and the changes that were made in various type families, especially in encoding of symbols and any non-ASCII characters. Simply doing a font format conversion of an existing Adobe Type 1 font does not typically yield the OpenType CFF version of the same font currently licensed by Adobe.

In terms of methods of converting Type 1 fonts to OpenType CFF fonts, the cited “Adobe OpenType Converter” is not software officially supported by Adobe. Other converters such as TransType may do an adequate job. One of the problems of some of the software is that in opening an existing Type 1 font and then saving as OpenType CFF, the original “hinting” of the Type 1 font may be lost, possibly replaced by “autohinting” by the particular piece of software. Fontlab VI does seem to preserve Type 1 font hinting and use the same when saving as OpenType CFF.

In general, converting Type 1 fonts to OpenType CFF or even worse, to TrueType or OpenType TrueType (even when not prohibited by the font's EULA) should be considered as more of an emergency process and not best-practices workflow when there are indeed modern OpenType CFF fonts supporting advanced OpenType features.

          - Dov