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Freeflyer · Jan 16, 2003, 10:56 PM

Hi all,

recently switched to macs. Do truetype fonts work on a mac?

I have several documents that I need to use which are in President font, which I haven't been able to find in the few mac font libraries.

Can anyone tell me what sort of fonts I need to be looking for, and if they know whether president is available.

Cheers,

J.

starman · Jan 16, 2003, 10:57 PM

Macs use TrueType, but you need to convert them from the PC to the Mac format. Look on versiontracker.com for a converter.

Mike

KaptainKaya · Jan 16, 2003, 11:10 PM

Actually using OS X you can just drop the font in the font folder and it will recognize it.

Millennium · Jan 16, 2003, 11:34 PM

Originally posted by Freeflyer:
Hi all,

recently switched to macs. Do truetype fonts work on a mac?

Apple invented TrueType, actually. They created it in response to Adobe's Type 1 fonts, which were very good, but Adobe kept the format a secret, licensing only the inferior Type 3 format. TrueType was created to fill the need for a good font format that allowed such things as hinting, outside of Adobe's monopoly. This is one of the reasons you never hear about Type 3 fonts anymore; no one uses them nowadays.

As for Microsoft's role in all this, they licensed the format from Apple to use in Windows, because they didn't exactly like being under Adobe's thumb when it came to scalable fonts either. In a rather uncharacteristic move for them, they didn't even try to Embrace and Extend it.

On Mac OS 9, TrueType fonts were stored in the resource fork of a file. This was actually quite similar to the .TTF format Windows uses, such that it's actually possible to convert between Mac and Windows TrueType fonts with little trouble.

In OSX, though, there's no need for conversion. OSX supports both the older Mac format and the Windows .TTF format.

I have several documents that I need to use which are in President font, which I haven't been able to find in the few mac font libraries.

Don't worry about that. If you still have your PC with the President font, you can just copy the files straight across. You'll probably want to put them in /Library/Fonts (where every user on the machine can use them, as opposed to just you). Once you've done that, you're done. You'll need to quit any apps that were running before you put the files in and restart them before they'll see your new font, though.

krove · Jan 17, 2003, 01:41 AM

If you are interested, this Apple Employee blog (Ken Bereskin) has some hints about using the Font panel under OS X. Stuff most people probably never knew about...

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100676/

cpt kangarooski · Jan 17, 2003, 05:41 AM

Oh it's better than that -- Apple and MS both resented Adobe charging a fortune for PostScript (or at least, getting a fortune that rightfully should've gone to Apple and MS

, as well as fielding a superior volleyball team.

Thus, a deal was reached: Apple would make TrueType, and break the PostScript font power of Adobe, and MS would make TrueImage, and get them for graphics capabilities.

Guess who delivered and honored the agreement, and who took advantage of the other side?

Oh well, it was a long time ago.

starman · Jan 17, 2003, 07:03 AM

Originally posted by KaptainKaya:
Actually using OS X you can just drop the font in the font folder and it will recognize it.

Hmm...Double-clicking on Mac TT fonts brings up the font viewer. Doing that with PC TT fonts brings up an error.

Mike

Freeflyer · Jan 17, 2003, 11:20 AM

Thanks everyone.

I just copied over the tt font from my pc and everything looks good.

Cheers,

J.

Mediaman_12 · Jan 17, 2003, 02:24 PM

Originally posted by krove:
If you are interested, this Apple Employee blog (Ken Bereskin) has some hints about using the Font panel under OS X. Stuff most people probably never knew about...

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100676/

Just read that page. I now realise I can have individual font's in folders (gasp) in the OS Font folders. No moe 100's of lose files in the one folder.