Has anyone else experienced a typeface changing its own extension from .otf to something else? Is this something my OS has done? I've noticed it with typefaces I've grabbed from Time Machine archives but also other instances too...once it changed its extension to .suit but I don't get where that comes from??
Also trying to change it back to .otf just made it corrupt. I wrote the foundry (Hoefler) and they just sent me new otfs, but I wonder how this happens? I don't use font management software, I just load what I'm using right into the native font library in the OS.
Comments
If you were a font newbie, I'd be wondering if it was possible that H&FJ supplied you with multiple formats of the fonts in the first place, and you accidentally grabbed the wrong one from the backup.
In the original Mac file system, files could have two different components or "forks", a data fork and a resource fork. The data fork is just like a file on any other operating system. Documents for applications mainly stored stuff in the data fork, with a little metadata in the resource fork. The resource fork is in a special format and is invisible to non-Mac operating systems, and was reserved for system resources, such as code, icons, window info, and fonts. So, in a font suitcase, everything is in the resource fork. Which is why, if you try to move a Mac font suitcase to a non-Mac OS, you get an empty file.
File extensions were not needed on the classic Mac OS, but users sometimes added them. For font suitcases, .suit was common, but I've also seen .bmap and .scr. None of these have ever been needed on Macs, even now. If you delete the .suit extension, the Mac OS will still identify it as a font suitcase because of the creator/type metadata in the file's resource fork. Extensions like .suit are just conventions invented by users.
However, in (since) the 1990s a TrueType font suitcase could contain the FOND and sfnt data (so, bitmaps + outlines).
I’m curious whether the guts of the file in question could tell us a bit more about the mystery. Would you be willing to send it to Serif_Holmes[at]dtl.nl ?
F.
So some font suitcases had no extension, some had a .suit extension, and if they were for PS or bitmap-only fonts, they might have a .bmap extension. But in those olden days anybody could stick any extension on any Mac file and it wouldn't affect the file's functionality at all.
Best, Serif H.
Serif H.