Microsoft is
removing Wordpad from future builds of Windows 11. Windows 11 still supports Type 1 fonts at the moment, and WordPad was one way to use them. LibreOffice Writer does not seem to make them available. It appears
AbiWord still does, but the last release was in 2021, and the main Abisource website is inaccessible.
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The antique GDI API is about as old as Windows. It was later updated to natively support Type 1, but every Windows text API introduced since then does not! Not GDI+, WPF or DirectWrite.
GDI+ was introduced in Windows 2000. It did not get massive adoption, but has a few notable adherents (including the WordArt feature in Word). Windows Presentation Foundation was introduced in 2006. DirectWrite was introduced in 2008–09.
So, yes, Type 1 support at the OS level on Windows is super sketchy because it is only available in an ancient, deprecated API. This is not new and is not at all likely to “improve.” Very few apps people still use, that handle text interactively for users, use GDI.
Adobe, the inventor of the format, has long since withdrawn support of Type 1 fonts: announced January 2021, fully in effect by January 2023.
Type 1 support is a set of space travelers in cryo-sleep, almost all of whom have died, and prospects are very grim for the remaining two. Even if they were revived, there are not enough of them to repopulate their species.
Luckily, there are two realistic options for those who need to use Type 1 fonts: Either find a way to run old software that supports it, or convert Type 1 fonts to OpenType.
For what it’s worth, I am a bit of an OCD archivist person, and I do sometimes open — or reproduce — old documents where the original font and its metrics are important. So I sometimes want to use my old fonts too. It’s pretty inconvenient, but life goes on.
https://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/transtype/
But John is concerned about situations where there are some newer elements in play, such as future builds of Windows 11, and what apps are available today. For setups that are not frozen at 20 years ago, but continue to run current/recent OSes and apps, the users of those are already having a hard time using Type 1 fonts, and it is going to continue to get harder.
For several years now, macOS has had increasingly weak support for Mac Type 1 fonts. Currently, the fonts will still work if you install them (except in recent Adobe apps), but they've lost their custom icons in the Finder, showing just a generic document icon instead. The outline fonts are still identified as PostScript Type 1 Font in the Finder, but the screen font file is identified as TrueType—which it's not. They were previously identified as "Font Suitcase."
Installation is also partially broken. If you try to open the screen font in the Finder, Font Book will complain that there is no font data. However, if you use the Add Fonts command in Font Book and select the folder containing both the screen fonts and outline fonts, it will install it no problem. A simpler and more reliable method is to copy a folder containing the fonts into one of the system font folders, such as your user fonts folder in your home directory.
Finally, for quite a while now, Mac font suitcases (used for Type 1 screen fonts and older Mac TT fonts) are not supported by iCloud. So if you place a Mac font suitcase on iCloud and then try to access it on another Mac, the file will show zero K, since all the font data is stored in the resource fork. The reason is iCloud doesn't support resource forks in files, only data forks. They are still supported by the OS itself (so far). FWIW, Dropbox fully supports this older Mac file type. Not sure about other cloud services.