type on call

[rogersgeorge]

I lost many of my Adobe fonts recently during a system restore. I purchased them years ago and installed them with Type On call PC 4.1, and transferred them manually each time I upgraded to a new computer. I happen to still have two of the Type On Call CDs and the documentation for about thirty-five of my purchases (iow I have the access keys). However, the CD won't run on my Windows 10 PC! How can I restore my fonts? Tech support, both chat and in person was unable to help, and I couldn't find anything useful on the Adobe site.

[John T Smith]

Go to Microsoft – Official Home Page and search for an article on installing fonts in Win10

[rogersgeorge]

Alas, Microsoft assumes you already have the unlocked font file. All I have is a Type On Call CD and the unlocking codes.

[steve10100]

If your lost fonts are a valuable asset it might be worth considering installing Oracles Virtual Box and running an older Windows version from inside that environment. I run Windows 3.11 from Virtual Box on my Windows 7 PC with most of my old applications (including Adobe Type Manager 3.02, Acrobat Professional 3.0 and the TOC CD).

PM me if you need more information.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Moved to the Type & Typography forum.

The problem is that the program on the CD is a 16-bit Windows program, something that simply doesn't run anymore on modern Windows systems. And the product is exceptionally old and hasn't been supported by Adobe for years.

Assuming that you have actual backups from the system that had to be restored, you would need to find and manually move the font files that were unlocked from Type On Call to the new system and install from there. The Type On Call fonts were if I recall correctly all Type 1 fonts which meant that for each font you installed, there was a .pfb and .pfm file. If you can find those and move them back from your backup, you should be able to install those fonts.

                 - Dov

PS:     Type On Call was probably discontinued 15 years ago or so.