The Rosetta Library

The Rosetta library is included with Mac OS X. Its purpose is to allow Macintosh computers with Intel processors to be able to run applications written for PowerPCs. Rosetta is installed by default in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 but not in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). If you’re installing Mac OS X 10.6, you can choose the “Customize” option during the installation. In the Customize option you can enable Rosetta and it will be installed on your system.

If Mac OS X 10.6 is already installed on your computer, during the installation of a FontLab product a dialog box should appear that says, “To open this application, you need to install Rosetta. Would you like to install it now?” If this should occur, then simply choose “Install” and proceed with the installation of Rosetta. Once Rosetta has been installed, the FontLab application should install normally.

FontLab says that they have tested most of their major applications on Mac OS X 10.6 and have not found them to be incompatible. They have posted a tech note on this topic at their website.

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.