Does any app exist to extract fonts from old font suitcases?

Several threads on this and font management suffer contributors apparently from not having lived in the classic environment, I suppose. (Kurt Lang: really. Truetype fonts WERE commonly sold by vendors as families packaged in suitcases with the .suit file type).

What makes you think I don't know that?

One version of Fontographer was responsible for creating Mac legacy TrueType suitcase fonts with a .suit extension. It didn't hurt anything to do so since the extension meant nothing anyway, but it confused the heck out of users since a .suit extension normally meant it was the suitcase for a Type 1 PostScript font, and now you had to look for the missing outline printer fonts.

Macromedia stopped doing that with the next major upgrade of Fontographer. But by then of course, there were hundreds, or more likely thousands of Mac TrueType fonts out there with a .suit extension.

Whether the suitcase has an extension or not, here's what you have:

TrueType suitcase: There's nothing necessary to extract. Use them as is. Or, if you want, convert them to OpenType.

Type 1 PostScript suitcase: Useless without the printer outlines. You can't do anything with only the suitcase of bitmap screen fonts. When you convert a T1 PS font to OpenType, it has to do that from the outline printer fonts (where the actual vector outline glyphs are). Without them, you'll get nothing.

Yes, TransType is very good. There a couple of other translators that also do good job.

It also gives the option of converting to off and can group them in families so FEX gives you a more concise selection in the Adobe CC apps.

Can't quite guess how "converting to off" was supposed to read. The fonts likely (but not necessarily) already have family names so the typefaces would group together, but the further we get away from the old styles of fonts into Unicode, the more of these odd issues seem to be appearing. The biggest being placement of the non-Latin characters.

If you're counting glyph cells starting at zero, the space character is at ordinal position 32. After that the most standard punctuation marks and numbers. Then the letter A at position 65. It then runs through all upper case letters, followed by a few more standard glyphs and then all lower case. No real issue there since all fonts should have these glyphs in the same spots whether then have an assigned Unicode value or not.

The problem with old fonts and up-to-date Unicode aware apps is the position of less commonly used glyphs. Here's Garamond, both by Adobe. Type 1 PostScript first, OpenType second.

The most obvious difference is there are no glyphs before the space character in the OpenType version. 1/2, 1/4 and others are before that in the T1 PS version. Those have predefined Unicode positions and will always be in the same ordinal position. But in an older font like the T1 PS version, they can be wherever the vendor making the font felt like putting it. Basically, there were no rules or conformity of any kind for extended glyphs.

Many of the extended glyphs shown here line up well with the OpenType version, but I've seen some horribly jumbled fonts. One was so bad, a person sent me the font to look at because it no longer worked for them. It would display correctly, but print alphabet soup. Looking at it in FontLab (as above) I couldn't believe the font ever worked. I rearranged the entire thing to put glyphs where they were supposed to be, assigned Unicode values to them and saved it as an OpenType PostScript font. Sent it back to them and they were extremely happy. It was a corporate font they were required to use for their government contract work and had to get it fixed.

The point of all of that is because those older fonts would puts extended glyphs in positions essentially chosen at whim, you many have seen 1/2 where you expected in a very old version of Word, InDesign, Quark XPress, etc., but when you opened that old document (even with the original font open), the 1/2 glyph may not show. That because, the new version of the app is looking for 1/2 in its Unicode position, but that's not where the glyph is in the old font.

The good news. As long as the font cells have their proper names assigned to them, when you convert the font to OpenType, the converter app will move all of the glyphs to their Unicode positions for you.

TTF seems to work better than OTF, but OTF has the more powerful glyph functions, right?

Sort of. A font that ends with .otf isn't necessarily a PostScript version. Why it was ever allowed to use .otf for a TrueType OpenType font, I don't know. It only serves to cause confusion. But anywho, it doesn't matter if the OpenType font you're using is a PostScript or TrueType variety. They're still both OpenType and can have the same functionality built into them.

Probably the biggest difference between TT and PS fonts is hinting. With TT fonts, all hinting has to be built into the font. That's a lot of extra time tweaking a font so letter forms come out looking as expected at various point sizes you print them at (hinting also affects how the letterforms of a font appear on screen). It all depends on how much time the vendor wants to spend on a font, but it can eat up a lot of hours setting various hinting points throughout a font; different hinting locations on each glyph set to take effect at different point sizes.

PostScript fonts don't need such in-depth hinting. The PostScript interpreter used by the OS, or the one in a PostScript enabled printer do most of the work. And when minor tweaking is done to the interpreter to improve hinting, every PostScript font you have automatically benefits - assuming the update doesn't make hinting worse instead of better. But, it saves a lot of time building a quality font since the author doesn't have to spend much time on hinting.

Some basics of what hinting does.

Bluesparks "i'm think the best solution is to convert the old files into .otf using something like transtype. thoughts?"

TransType will process only some Apple suitcases: font.dfont (e.g., Geneva.dfont) and font.ttc (e.g., Didot.ttc).

However, TransType cannot process any font.ttf (e.g., Skia.ttf) where it just opens one Regular file.

Terminal cat "Skia.ttf/..namedfork/rsrc" ~/"/Users/username/Desktop/Skia.ttf hangs Mac desktop Terminal app.

I also tried Suitcase Fusion 8 without success. Any ideas how to open/create macOS TTF Suitcase?