Given that Mac OS X has virtually nothing in common with its predecessor, Mac OS 9, the fact that Apple managed to build it to support all the same font types OS 9 did is quite an impressive undertaking. On the other hand, they had to support legacy fonts or graphic designers would have stayed away in droves. Most designers and shops have invested so much money in Mac fonts over the years that re-purchasing the fonts in some new format would have made an OS X upgrade cost-prohibitive. (If the "Read more..." link appears below, click it to read the rest of this article.)
Out of the box, Mac OS X supports a variety of font formats:
- TrueType: This format is Apple's recommended format to use with OS X. TrueType fonts are designed to be scaled up and down in size without looking "jagged". A single TrueType font file can hold information for several variants of that same font (such as italic, bold, or bold-italic), which makes the files convenient to work with. While Windows XP also supports (and prefers) TrueType fonts, the Windows font file formats aren't quite the same as the Mac TrueType file formats. The good news is that Apple designed OS X to recognize Windows TrueType files as well as Macintosh TrueType files. That makes tools such as "TTConverter" that were popular on OS 9 systems for converting TrueType files unnecessary.
- PostScript: These are the "traditional" fonts from pre-OS 9 days. There are two files for each PostScript font. One contains a "suitcase" file with bitmap images of the font at one or more sizes and variations. The other contains the PostScript "printer font file" that the printer uses to scale the font size without looking "jagged". If you used Adobe Type Manager (ATM) on Mac OS 9, you didn't notice any jagginess on screen because ATM used the printer font file to create a picture of the font at any required sizes with no more jagginess than actually necessary. There is no version of ATM for Mac OS X, but it's unnecessary anyway. OS X draws all of its on-screen graphics using a technology called "Quartz" which draws all its fonts using the same font information used by a printer (or by ATM), so you generally aren't going to see any jagginess with a PostScript font on OS X.
- PostScript Multiple Master Fonts: These are not supported in Mac OS X. Fortunately, I don't think too many people ever bought into this Adobe technology, so you probably don't have any of these that didn't come bundled with something Adobe sold you.
- OpenType: This font format is a new design from Microsoft and Adobe. Similar to TrueType, an OpenType font contains one file for each font. That one file might contain the different variants (bold, italic, etc.) for the font. The main advantage to OpenType is that the exact same font file (without change) works on Mac OS X and Windows.
- Bitmap: This is pretty much a legacy font left over from the days before PostScript laser printers. These fonts are stored in suitcase files, just like the screen fonts for PostScript files, but unlike Postscript screen fonts, there is no matching printer font. As a result, bitmap fonts tend to look very jagged when printed on today's laser printing equipment. Because of their poor quality, few designers make much use of these fonts today unless they are designing something to look "retro". While Classic in OS X will more or less accept these fonts, and you might get Mac OS X to work with them if you're lucky, it's not recommended that you use bitmap fonts with OS X.
Getting all the above font types to work with OS X (OK, except for Multiple Master fonts and "official" support for Bitmap fonts) was quite an achievement. Unfortunately, for graphic designers, the support between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X isn't seemless and trouble-free. Far from that, in fact. OS X offers lots of opportunities for Font Headaches.
OS X Font Headache #1 - Sudden Name Changes
When helping one of our designers make the OS 9 to OS X switch, I learned that while OS 9 might recognize and group together a variety of fonts as "Garamond", OS X did something else. One of the fonts might come in as "AGaramond", another as "Garamond", and yet another as "Adobe Garamond". Other fonts that had been grouped together on OS 9 were split up even worse. When the designer took a look at the font list, he couldn't find many of the fonts he used regularly. They were there, I'd made sure of that. They'd just been named differently by OS X and spread throughout the Font menu.
OS X Font Headache #2 - Fonts That Didn't Appear in OS X
Some fonts wouldn't come over from OS 9 at all. Perhaps they were corrupted. Perhaps they had conflicting IDs that OS 9 didn't notice and OS X did. For those, I would up feeding some through a font format conversion utility to change them from PostScript to TrueType (or vice-versa). In a few cases, we simply had to buy brand new copies of the fonts from an online vendor. Even those new copies had their problems. After spinning our collective mental wheels on this for far too long, we hired an outside consultant who came in, used Suitcase X to sort out the corrupted, conflicting, and otherwise problematic fonts, and things got better. But they're still nothing like the nice, neatly organized OS 9 font list.
OS X Font Headache #3 - Administrator Permission Required
To try and minimize the "trauma" associated with moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, we deployed a "pilot" machine in the graphic arts area. This machine had a "superset" of all the software the designers used on their individual Macs. It had a "superset" of all their fonts, too. Still, they occasionally found they need one or another font that hadn't made it to the pilot machine. Unfortunately, OS X only let them install it for themselves, one at a time. Aside from giving them all administrator permission to the machine, which is a no-no in our company, there was nothing we could do for them except have an administrator do it. The good news is that it's unlikely that they will be getting that many new fonts, so this will not be a huge issue for the two of us who do administrator work.
OS X Font Headache #4 - Where the Heck is that Font?
In Mac OS 9, you had one place to look for your fonts. They were in the System Folder, in the "Fonts" folder. If you had Suitcase, they could be in a variety of places, but for them to be in all those places you had to know where they were. So on a "stock" OS 9 build, you knew where to find and where to put your fonts. Not so in Mac OS X. If you're looking for a specific font, you might find it in one of these places...
/Library/Fonts/
/System/Library/Fonts/
/Users/~/Library/Fonts/
(Classic Folder)/System Folder/Fonts/
/Network/Library/Fonts/
And if the above isn't enough for you, certain applications also have their own Fonts folders. Adobe is one example of this. They drop a number of fonts in "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/" which aren't available to other applications because they're in a non-standard location. Gotta love developers who think they know better than the operating system... Sometimes I wonder if this was done on purpose to make it easier to sell third-party software like Suitcase X.
OS X Font Headache #5 - Font Book List Alphabetization Weirdness
In Mac OS 9, fonts were listed alphabetically in the Font menu from top to bottom. OS X, for some reason, dispenses with this. If you launch Font Book and scroll down the font list, you'll see that it goes A-Z and A-Z again, etc. This doesn't make designers very happy either. If they're looking for "Garamond" in the font list, not only might Apple have called it "AGaramond" or "Adobe Garamond" or "Garamond" or "ITC Garamond", they might also have placed it in separate parts of the list so that each one appears in a separate A-Z section of the list.
At first, I thought Font Book had some rhyme or reason in how it decided which A-Z list the font went into. For example, I thought maybe TrueType fonts were listed first, then PostScript, then OpenType. That's not it. The Font Book list on the machine at my desk displays in Font Book like this:
Abadi MT ...xtra Bold
Abadi MT ...sed Light
Al Bayan
American Typewriter
.
. <snip>
.
Zapf Dingbats
Zapfino
#GungSeo
#HeadLineA
.
. <snip>
.
Apple Chancery
AppleGothic
.
.
.
Monotype Sorts
In the above list, "Al Bayan" is a Windows TrueType font that resides in the "/Library/Fonts" directory, "American Typewriter" is a Macintosh Datafork TrueType font in "/Library/Fonts", "Zapf Dingbats" is a Macintosh Datafork TrueType font in the "/System/Fonts" directory, and "Apple Chancery" is a Macintosh Datafork TrueType font in the "/Library/Fonts" directory.
OS X Font Headache #6 - Fonts are the Same, But Not Quite
Something else our developers noticed was that documents created in OS 9, when opened in OS X, didn't quite lay out their type the same way. Why? Because OS X is a different operating system (despite Apple's claims that it's just the next evolution of OS 9) and it renders fonts on screen and on the printer using different technology than OS 9. Just as the same document prints slightly differently on Windows and Mac OS 9, the same document prints differently on Mac OS X than on Mac OS 9. This is one more way that Apple really shafted graphic artists with OS X. Fortunately for the designers, this ought to be a one-time nuisance (as long as a document stays on OS X once "ported" to it).
Conclusion - OS X Font Support is Impressive... Kind of... If you don't look very deeply...
While I am impressed that Apple managed to incorporate support for all the major font formats (including Windows TrueType and OpenType) in OS X, it's clear to me that they must have rushed OS X out the door. A little more work might have merged the fonts from "/Library/Fonts" and "/System/Library/Fonts" into one folder, to reduce the number of potential font installation locations. With a touch more work, fonts installed by end users could have gone into either that merged directory (with UNIX permissions that make them unreadable by other users) and made it possible to have non-administrator users install fonts for everyone to use. (It's not like this would have created a major security problem...)
Perhaps more amazing to me is that I don't see a whole lot of loud screaming and complaining about this on the Mac message forums. Perhaps that's why these font issues have persisted from (at least) OS X 10.2 to 10.4.
Maybe this confusing mess just doesn't bother the rest of you like it does me...
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