Installing FFIL or LWFN Fonts in Leopard

I'm working on a similar question, and have been browsing around Google for a bit. Take any of this with a grain of salt.

FFIL fonts are old-style Mac fonts dating back to pre-OS X. Your issue may be that you only have part of the font, as on the old Mac OS most files had a data fork and a resource fork. It's possible you only have one of those parts. That's the first thing I would look into. If this is the case, the fix probably depends on how you are getting these fonts from an old computer to the newer one. (?)

Hope that's helpful. Kinda vague, but better than nothing. Good luck. 🙂

Okay -- a little more digging. In some cases, you need both the FFIL and LWFN of the same font to be in the same folder (the two files are two parts of the same font.) Rather than trying to drop them in FontBook, go to your <username>/Library/Fonts folder and drop them in there. Now close/reopen FontBook or whatever other program you want to test it out in.

Also note: Search the Apple discussions for "ffil" but set the time for "all" instead of "last 30 days". You'll find a lot more info. 🙂

FFIL files are a font suitcase, which can either be a suitcase of TrueType fonts, or the suitcase of screen fonts for a Type 1 PostScript font. LWFN files are the outline printer fonts for a Type 1 PostScript font.

You cannot open LWFN fonts by themselves in any way. You must have the matching screen fonts. As an example, here's Adobe Garamond.

Adobe Garamond
AGarBol
AGarBolIta
AGarIta
AGarReg
AGarSem
AGarSemIta

The first file which I highlighted in green is the font suitcase of bitmap screen fonts. The rest are the individual outline printer fonts. Both must be in the same folder in order to work. When placed in a Fonts folder or activated with a font manager, the OS or manager only looks in the suitcase for the available type faces.

I ran in to something similar today. I had placed a lot of our fonts on a PC-based server, but my G4 running on 10.4.9 had no problem seeing the files correctly (LWFN, FFIL, etc.). However, we just purchased an Intel G5 running Leopard and it didn't recognize the fonts on the server. I copied the fonts onto a thumbdrive (from their home on the server)and plugged the drive into the Leopard G5. In the Finder window, they showed up properly, and when I copied into the Fonts folder on that machine, Fusion Suitcase handled them correctly. So, a little tedious, but definitely a life saver.