A question: Converting a text's font

[Okaya]

Hello to all,

I have the following question, and would certainly welcome any feedback:

A friend happens to have a large number of Adobe Pagemaker files (Macintosh edition) in his old Mac OS 9 system. These texts are in a custom Postscript font that he had created, years ago. Pagemaker is a program that eventually stopped being updated by Adobe, and the files in question could not be effectively read by even porting them to a newer system that runs InDesign (which partially supports Pagemaker files).

What is desired at present, is to perhaps manage to export the content of these files, without corruption of the content. I suppose that a conversion of the font file itself into a different font type would not have the least effect or relation with the content of files that were created prior to that font's conversion. Nor would that affect their corruption-free portability. So the question is, what would be the required procedure for a given text's content, written in a certain font type (a custom Postscript font, in this case), to be actually converted in full into a different corresponding font type (e.g. TrueType), with the content unaffected? Is there any program that can undertake such a conversion process?

I note that the custom Postscript font referred to here is a Sanskrit transliteration font, which was built for my friend when Indic fonts where still not very prevalent in computer systems.

I appologize for any potentially hazy descriptions in the above account, I describe this without having had the chance to see my friend's system and font first hand, and am not a user of Macintosh myself. But I intend to get more definite information on the matter, so if I am being unclear in my above description, I could inquire for more details.


Thank you for any help with this question. Any feedback is much appreciated. With best wishes,

Okaya

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Sorry for the delay in replying — I only just noticed this post. Did you find a solution yet?

I assume the font is in Postscript Type 1 format, in which case FontCreator won't be able to convert it to Truetype easily. You would need FontLab Studio or a font conversion utility.

It may be possible to transfer the content of the files by using the PDF format. If the fonts are embedded in the PDF, then InDesign, PagePlus, or OpenOffice Draw should be able to open the files without destroying the layout.