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    Intermediate - Advanced  
 
  Porting Fonts Across Platforms:
Intro 1

Understanding Mac® and PC Fonts

  Note: This is a very basic description of how to port fonts across platforms and is intended for personal use only. It is not intended for making commercial fonts. There are many aspects to font conversion and you should be aware that a font you prepare may not function exactly like a commercial font. It takes a lot of study and practice to get it right.

Porting fonts between Macintosh® and Windows® systems is an intermediate to advanced topic depending on the software you use and the approach you take. Not all fonts are totally cross-platform compatible. One reason is that the keyboards of the two platforms are different and the codes representing the keystrokes in the font don't always reconcile when the font is converted. However, it can be very useful to be able to convert Mac and PC fonts even on a basic level. You may only have one version of a font that you absolutely need for the other platform and a converted font will do in a pinch.

Differences Between Mac and PC Fonts

The biggest difference between Mac and PC fonts is that the Macintosh file system stores fonts as resources. As mentioned here, Mac resources are unusable in the PC file system. Fortunately, the available font conversion utilities are fairly inexpensive and they take care of this difference. As mentioned previously, another difference is the way the two systems map characters to the keyboard.

One Byte Fonts

Each character in a font uses a keystroke or combination of keystrokes to produce the character. Fonts based on most Western languages will have 256 possible characters. Each character in these fonts is one-byte in length. A one-byte character can have one of 256 possible values.

One byte is 8-bits long and each bit is one of two possible values (either a one or a zero) so that's 2 to the 8th or 256. Other languages may require more than 256 characters. Asian languages use many more characters than Western languages so they require two bytes per character. Each character in a two-byte font has one of 65536 possible values.

How Fonts Are Mapped To The Keyboard

All of the characters in a one-byte font can be displayed in a 256-character map. Shown below is a character map for Adobe® Garamond on a PC:

In a font, each character is arranged in a specific order. This is called a font's "encoding", which is explained in more detail below. The computer uses this information to tell which character to display or print when a key is pressed. The spaces occupied by characters are called "slots". Each slot represents a different keypress. For example, if you were working on a word-processing document and you were to hold the Shift key while pressing the letter "A" on the keyboard, you would see the letter "A" appear on the screen.

If you will notice, the above character map is divided into 2 "zones" - the top zone and the bottom zone. The top zone has characters 0 through 127 and the bottom zone has characters 128 through 255. The point to this is that characters occupying slots 32 through 127 in the top zone are identical in both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Characters 0 through 31 (the "lower 32") are usually reserved for the operating system. The slots in the bottom zone (the "extended characters") are different. These are the ones you need to watch.

Encoding

Note: The FontLab® user manual has a more thorough description of encoding. The FontLab web site has an online version in Adobe Acrobat® format which you can download by clicking here. You can also download the free Adobe Acrobat® reader from the Adobe web site by clicking here.

It is important to understand how font conversion software handles the ordering of characters and the assignment of their slots in the character map. This is called the "encoding" of the font. Getting the right encoding will make the difference between pressing a key and getting the right character or the wrong character.

All text printed or displayed by a computer is made up of computer codes. Something has to translate the codes into character pictures contained in the font. A font's encoding is simply a lookup table (an index) which is used to translate computer codes into the characters in the font.

How the encoding table functions

The graphic below illustrates how the encoding table functions. The software looks up the computer code in the encoding table and obtains the name of the character (three). Then it finds the character in the font whose name is "three" and displays or prints the character picture "3" from that font:

Two kinds of encoding

Every character in a font is identified by a unique name or a number. All standard encoding methods use either names or numbers to identify characters. Font conversion or editing software can usually detect the encoding automatically because it will recognize the character names or numbers used to identify them.

1. Character identification by names

Type 1 fonts use names to identify characters. The graphic below is an example of using names to identify characters. The number of characters in a font that uses names encoding is limited to 256.

Examples of using names to identify characters:

2. Character identification by numbers

TrueType® fonts use numbers to identify characters. The graphic below is an example of using numbers to identify characters. The most widely supported standard for using numbers to identify characters is called Unicode. Most Macintosh TrueType fonts and all Windows TrueType fonts use Unicode to identify characters. The advantage to using Unicode to identify characters is that the font can have more than 256 characters. The Unicode standard uses two bytes per character for the identifier and, as a result, a font using Unicode can have up to 65536 possible characters (see above for one byte and two-byte fonts).

When using Unicode in Western languages, most Windows Latin fonts use MS Windows 1252 Latin 1 encoding and most Macintosh Latin fonts use Mac OS Roman encoding.

Examples of using numbers to identify characters:

Always Use The Correct Encoding

You may be able to get all the characters of the alphabet right as well as numerals 0 through 9 (because there is no difference in the way Macintosh and Windows encodes characters 32 through 127), but one of the tests of a successful conversion between platforms is to get ALL the characters right. The only way to do this is to make sure that the font is properly encoded when the conversion is made.

Although most font conversion software can select the encoding automatically, it is not always correct. It is wise to print out or view the font's character map to check its encoding after it has been converted (more here on font utilities which you can use to print out a character map). It also helps to identify a font's encoding before the conversion takes place so you can control the process. As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial this can be an intermediate or an advanced topic depending upon the software and the approach you take.

Let's take a look at the software, next...


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