Properly installing Type 1 fonts in Mac OS X Leopard
Special thanks to: D. Hoffmann for permission to post this discussions post as a tip
Properly installing Type 1 fonts in Mac OS X Leopard.
Originally posted on Properly installing Type 1 fonts in Mac O… - Apple Community
I was trying to migrate my Type 1 Outline fonts back from Monterey to Mac OS X Leopard. I have Leopard installed in a UTM guest VM, together with Microsoft Office 2008. I want to be able to open some old Microsoft Word files, which the current Word version refuses to open. Back then, I used two favorite Adobe font families, which I had obtained on floppy disk in Type 1 format.
Copying the files from my ~/Library/Fonts folder in the current macOS Monterey installation on my M1 Mac will not get them recognized by the Leopard Font Book app. In fact, they show up as Unix executables with a zero file length. I suspected that this had to do something with them originally coming as forked (resource fork, data fork) Mac OS (Classic, prior to the FreeBSD-based Mac OS X) files. Probably, migrating my user home folder through Migration Assistant over the years got them converted properly without my noticing that they had changed. However, those converted files no longer work in Leopard.
I found two discussions in this forum which seemed to struggle with this issue, as well:
Fonts showing up as Unix executible files… - Apple Community
Old Font Files in Leopard showing up as U… - Apple Community
Luckily I had disk image files of the original floppy disks that the fonts came on, which I copied to my Leopard VM and opened. I then created new folders for each font family and copied all Type 1 outline font files and also the suitcase files belonging to those outline font files into them. I then opened those folders, one by one, from within Font Book. It turned out to be crucial that the font suitcases were included in those imports. It took me a while to figure that out, because suitcase files were solidly from the pre-Mac OS X era. My guess, why they are needed by Font Book in Leopard, still, is that they contain some stylistic linking information to the outline files.
Just wanted to documented this, because working with OSs from 15 years ago, when you don’t work with them every day anymore, can be very hard. There is so much I have forgotten, which back then would have come to me very readily.