Adobe announces end of support for “PostScript” Type 1 fonts

Thomas Phinney

Back when Adobe finished converting its font library to OpenType around 2003-04, I wanted to draw some kind of line in the sand, but that idea got quickly shot down from many sides. However, the day has finally come!

In January 2023, Type 1 fonts will stop being supported for authoring in most other Adobe products, except for Document Cloud apps (Acrobat, Adobe Sign, Acrobat Reader). Photoshop will end Type 1 support in 2021 (as announced in 2019).

https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html

Mark Simonson

That's too bad. I'm actually still using quite a few. By which I mean, I still have quite a few installed. I always thought it was kind of great that you could still use fonts made in the eighties on modern computers. Oh, well. I guess it had to happen eventually.

James Puckett

Time to upgrade to Font Folio 11!

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Time to upgrade to non-Adobe.

John Savard

It is a Bad Thing for a font someone has paid good money for to suddenly not be usable.

In their help information, they don't even state that converting any and all of Adobe's Type 1 fonts that you may own to Open Type is hereby allowed notwithstanding anything in their license agreements - which is the least they should have done. A discount on OpenType versions is less than that least.

Andreas Stötzner

is there any rationale given about this decision? Technical requirements?

Or is it just user-unfriendly policy.

ivan louette

My Linux (Kubuntu 20.04 LTS) already doesn't suppport them while the previous 18.04 still did it. I have already spent some time to convert some of them to OpenType with FontForge…

Mark Simonson

macOS still supports Type 1 for now, but the suitcase files they depend on are no longer supported over local networks in Big Sur, as I mentioned in another thread. 

Also, while the Finder still lists their types correctly ("Font Suitcase" and "PostScript Type 1 outline font"), both file types have lost their icons. Instead the Finder shows the default I-have-no-idea-what-this-is icon.

So, I expect Apple will drop Type 1 support as well in the not too distant future.

Chris Lozos

I still have occasion to use the many type 1 fonts I purchased decades ago.

Hin-Tak Leung

ivan louette said:

My Linux (Kubuntu 20.04 LTS) already doesn't suppport them while the previous 18.04 still did it. I have already spent some time to convert some of them to OpenType with FontForge…

Really? I am curious where you hear that? Afaik type 1 fonts are supported indefinitely in the future on linux, though there are very few new ones being made. They are still being used in x11 and texlive. I still have just over 7000 on my regular system (fedora), most of them under texlive.

I just checked my raspberrypi, which has Ubuntu server 20.04 on. There are a little over 4000 type 1 fonts there. Again, almost all of that under texlive. (I don't use GUI on that system - in fact I don't even use a keyboard with it, entirely headless, so there is very little x11 stuff on it)

Thomas Phinney

John Savard said:

It is a Bad Thing for a font someone has paid good money for to suddenly not be usable.

Sure. But it is also an expense to continue supporting a legacy format forever. What proportion of other software that you licensed between 1985 and 2005, are you still running the same version of, on the latest computers today?

John Savard said:

In their help information, they don't even state that converting any and all of Adobe's Type 1 fonts that you may own to Open Type is hereby allowed notwithstanding anything in their license agreements - which is the least they should have done. A discount on OpenType versions is less than that least.

I totally agree that guidance in this area would be helpful. I won’t be surprised if Adobe clarifies this in the future. They should. There are certainly some fonts Adobe can give a blanket OK to end users to convert, if Adobe wishes to do so. Mostly Adobe Originals and a few other Adobe internal designs.

The main reason this is not simple is... which fonts are “Adobe’s”? When you look at the fonts Adobe licenses/licensed to end users, it was a minority of “the Adobe type library” that Adobe owns outright and can do with as they will. Other fonts were licensed from other foundries, subject to other restrictions, and the license terms can and did change a bit over time.

As I understand it (caveat there!), Adobe originally licensed all Adobe Type Library fonts on the same terms to end users in the 80s and 90s. But eventually there were splits in which fonts got treated what way, so... “it’s complicated.”

Mark Simonson

I was talking about this with another person (my wife) who still uses older Type 1 fonts actively for certain projects that have spanned over many years. She pointed out that many, if not most, users are not going to become aware of this until the fonts suddenly stop working with an app update, maybe as a deadline approaches.

This makes me wonder: Which will be more work (or more expensive) for Adobe--continuing to support a font format that hasn't changed in decades or dealing with (probably angry or confused) customers whose fonts suddenly stop working?

Is Adobe planning to be proactive about communicating this to customers as soon as possible to avoid such a situation?

The magnitude of this issue will depend on how many users are still actively using Type 1 fonts, I suppose. Does Adobe know?

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Mark Simonson said:
Which will be more work (or more expensive) for Adobe--continuing to support a font format that hasn't changed in decades or dealing with (probably angry or confused) customers whose fonts suddenly stop working?

The latter won't be expensive because these are people who have not and will not spend virtually any money on fonts, so can safely be treated like dirt... Adobe knows this well.

Mark Simonson

Maybe, but they are spending money for Creative Cloud. 

Andreas Stötzner

it looks like yet another misuse of a monopolist’s position, to me. Maybe Apple should back Affinity in the near future to bring back honest competion on stage.

However, I didn’t switch to CC and never will, CS5.5 does the job very well.

Ray Larabie

Is there legal protection anywhere in the world for consumers in terms of format conversion from obsolete software formats? It feels like it belongs alongside electronics right to repair laws. If the format is obsolete, the font you purchased is broken. In order to repair it, it needs to be converted to a currently supported format.

ivan louette

@Hin-Tak Leung Oops ! You are right ! The problem doesn't come from Linux itself but from LibreOffice and Inkscape which dropped the support for Type 1 fonts !

Mark Simonson

To quote myself earlier:

Is Adobe planning to be proactive about communicating this to customers as soon as possible to avoid such a situation?

Well, they are. I just opened a document containing Type 1 fonts in InDesign and got this warning:


Users may still be angry, but at least they won't be surprised when support is actually dropped.

Gary Long

I'm using Indesign CC, but am stuck at Indesign 2019 until I upgrade to the latest Mac OS. No warning with this version when a document with Type 1 fonts is opened, and presumably not with earlier versions of Indesign CC. Users of pre-CC versions would also be in the dark, and anyone using fonts with non-Adobe software.

I have some legacy documents (books published many years ago) set in Type 1 fonts. I wonder if these are saved as pdf, will they still print after Type 1 support ends?

Years ago I upgraded my Filosofia licence from Emigre from Type 1 to Opentype, and they gave me a substantial discount on the upgrade (I think I paid half what a brand new licence would have cost). I don't recall other foundries offering such upgrade discounts.

Thomas Phinney

As I said in the original post, Adobe is not ending support in Acrobat, Acrobat Reader and Adobe Sign.

And I just remembered a blog post I made on behalf of Adobe in 2005, talking about phasing out Type 1 as a format—which related to multiple public presentations I did that year). https://blog.typekit.com/2005/10/06/phasing_out_typ/
A general/long notice of 15 years, and a more immediate notice of two years... seems like this should not be a surprise any more. I think prominent warnings in the latest versions of the app, along with more public pronouncements, are significant notification.

At the time, I said (on behalf of Adobe) that all fonts licensed from Adobe could be converted by users, but as mentioned, some of Adobe’s licensing partners—notably Monotype—scuttled that in later years.

The surprise for me is that this day did not come sooner. That speaks to the entrenched nature of fonts, and the fact that people do expect them to last forever, unlike other kinds of software such as apps. So in that respect, my expectations were off.

That said, I totally understand the frustration. I have been working with fonts a long time, and there was a period where I went for Type 1 over TrueType... so yes, I still have a few Type 1 fonts in my library. Out of about 18500 fonts in Suitcase Fusion, about 1% are Type 1. Mostly custom fonts from one project, and dingbat fonts.

@Andreas Stötzner I firmly believe anybody who thinks that there will be competition to lure users irate over lack of Type 1 font support is... mistaken.

Apple’s documentation for example has described Type 1 fonts as “legacy fonts which might work but aren't recommended” for at least a couple of years (not sure how much longer): https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201749

Microsoft stopped supporting Type 1 in their newest imaging environments over a decade ago (unsupported by GDI+, WPF and DirectWrite)—although good old GDI exists in the latest versions of Windows, I expect the overwhelming majority of new apps are written for other imaging systems, and new versions of older apps often migrate.

Supporting Type 1 isn’t free for developers. They have to test it, and continue testing it with new app/OS versions, or it is likely to break. Recent years have seen many such breakages. Like Mac OS Catalina 10.15.1 breaking them across the board for non-Adobe apps, which was not fixed until 10.15.2.

The fact that Mac-flavor Type 1 fonts use a resource fork is especially troublesome. (Hell, the fact that there are platform-differentiated flavors of Type 1 is a problem, but at least Apple supports all three major flavors. Sort of.) Yes, there are workarounds such as repackaging the fonts as .dfonts; it is just another weight against Type 1 support.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

So, if you get a complaint from a user that your old font stopped working:

#1 Tell them Adobe is exercising its MoneyGod-given right to monopolistic behavior.

#2 Send them here:
https://convertio.co/pfa-otf/
(Thanks to Ken Lunde for the ref.)

Christopher Slye

I really don’t get the “monopoly” arguments here. Type 1 was essentially replaced by OpenType 20 years ago — forever in software terms. The format has been considered legacy software for quite a long time. (Plus everything Thomas said.)

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Transience is integral to consumerism.

Sami Artur Mandelbaum

Some years ago I found this software, and it looks original adobe:
https://vetusware.com/download/Adobe OpenType Converter/?id=10319
Adobe OpenType Converter
Does anyone know if is from Adobe?
It works very well.

John Hudson

I think we should be clear here that the real issue is actually about font licensing, and not about application or system support at all. Other platforms have already abandoned support for PS Type 1 fonts—along with various other legacy formats—and it only seems notable that Adobe are announcing discontinuation of support because PS Type 1 was Adobe’s technology.

The real issue is that some font licenses do not permit format conversion, even though that conversion may be technically trivial—certainly compared to, say, converting a hot metal font into a photo font—, and some font vendors chose not to provide free or discounted upgrade licensing.

André G. Isaak

Thomas Phinney said:

At the time, I said (on behalf of Adobe) that all fonts licensed from Adobe could be converted by users, but as mentioned, some of Adobe’s licensing partners—notably Monotype—scuttled that in later years.

The above is a bit confusing to me. Wouldn't users be bound by the license in effect at the time of purchase? I have quite a few archived Type 1 fonts from Adobe, including lots of Berthold BE fonts and fonts from Monotype. If the license under which these were purchased allowed for modification (and, AFAIK, they all did), I don't see how Monotype, Berthold, or any of the other companies which later stopped selling their fonts through Adobe could retroactively change the term of those licenses.

John Savard

André G. Isaak said:

Wouldn't users be bound by the license in effect at the time of purchase?

Oh yes, they are. Unfortunately, with many commercial software products, the license included with the product at the time of purchase says, in effect, "Big Software Company reserves the right to unilaterally change the terms of this license at any time as it chooses."

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - A. Skywalker (as Darth Vader)

Thomas Phinney

Both Andre and John S are correct. But even in the “good” cases... how many users track the license terms they got the font under? Most will just look at the current terms, and may not even know when they licensed the font.

Christopher Slye

Right. Adobe’s standard font EULA — essentially what they offered since Type 1 fonts came out — has always allowed conversions AFAIK. As you might expect, one cannot redistribute any converted font, and new versions count against the number of license seats, but any end user can convert to OpenType and use them if they have a tool to do it.

But as Thomas has pointed out, there was at some point a split in license terms for Monotype-owned fonts, but that was essentially to address font embedding permissions and modification. I don’t think any Adobe EULA makes a distinction for format conversion, specifically. (That language can be found in §14.7.4 (“You may convert and install the font software into another format for use in other environments ...”).

Yes, the EULA treats “modification” and “conversion” separately. §14.7.6 includes: “The fonts listed on the website as non-modifiable may be converted in accordance with Section 14.7.4 above, but may not be otherwise modified in any way.”

As always, I am not a lawyer, and everyone should read their license and make their own judgements about what’s allowed.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

BTW it's always a biting irony to note how all the Monotype-loathing foundries nonetheless eagerly adopted the horribly anti-cultural no-mod clause that Monotype normalized...

Nick Curtis

I acquiesced, which is quite different from eagerly adopting. A veritable monopoly in the marketplace is not something easily bucked.