Mike's Sketchpad Newsroom

Since I wrote the “Porting Fonts Tutorials” section of the website, there has been a new font conversion utility from Morrison SoftDesign (http://www.morrisonsoftdesign.com) that has been released. FontXChange is available for the Macintosh only and is for OS 10.3 or higher. It will convert fonts from Macintosh format to Windows format and vise-versa. The single-user license sells for $99 (US). It can convert fonts to OpenType PostScript (single-file format), PostScript Type 1 (two-file format) and TrueType for Macintosh and Windows.

One of the nice features is that it can batch convert an entire library of fonts. It also allows you to set preferences for different font encodings. It supports Adobe Standard, Unicode, Mac Roman, and Windows ANSI, and European encodings. With the new single-file OpenType format now being used, it can come in handy for converting PostScript two-file fonts to single-file OpenType fonts. This is especially helpful when working on page layouts with DTP applications where the document files will be edited on Macintosh and Windows computers. One of the biggest problems in the past was text reflow caused by font incompatibilites between Macintosh and Windows systems. Using OpenType fonts can help because the same font files can be used on both platforms.