I had actually thought that with the advent of MacOS X, Apple had done away with font incompatibilities. It installs Windows and Linux fonts with no problem, so there’s no need to have your own font file format, right?
My wife discovered the .dfont file this morning at work. As of this writing, the Wikipedia entry on the format is just a stub.
Datafork TrueType is a font wrapper used on Apple Macintosh computers running Mac OS X. It is a TrueType suitcase with the resource map in the data fork, rather than the resource fork as had been the case in Mac OS 9. It uses the file extension .dfont.
In plain English, it’s got all your regular TTF information in a different part of the file. Kind of like a .ZIP file for fonts. Useful, except only Macs read it. Fortunately, we have fondu. It’s available for all Unix systems (including Mac OS X) and provides a suite of utilities to convert different formats of TrueType fonts.
If you need to convert a dfont, get on a Unix machine (like your Mac, or the Ubuntu machine I use at work) and follow these instructions:
- Download and install fondu.
If you’re using a Mac, the .pkg file is what you’re after.
If you’re using Ubuntu, you can find it in Synaptic (it’s in the “universe” repository) or run “sudo apt-get install fondu” - In a terminal window, navigate to the location of the .dfont file
- Enter this command “fondu file.dfont“
- Enjoy the TTF files for your convenience
The Fondu homepage covers the other programs in the suite.
The only caveat is that Fondu is not available on Windows. There’s source files, so I’m sure if you’re a clever hacker you could do it yourself. But if some inconsiderate Mac user has pushed this file on you, send it back and tell them to convert it.
« Terminator Salvation Trailer Training a new generation of DMs »
