Adobe and Microsoft Break Some Old Files By Removing PostScript Font Support (arstechnica.com) 97
Recent developments, such as Adobe ending support for Type 1 fonts in 2023 and Microsoft discontinuing Type 1 font support in Office apps, may impact users who manage their own fonts, potentially leading to compatibility and layout issues in older files. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham writes: If you want to know about the history of desktop publishing, you need to know about Adobe's PostScript fonts. PostScript fonts used vector graphics so that they could look crisp and clear no matter what size they were, and Apple licensed PostScript fonts for the original LaserWriter printer; together with publishing software like Aldus PageMaker, they made it possible to create a file that would look exactly the same on your computer screen as it did when you printed it. The most important PostScript fonts were so-called "Type 1" fonts, which Adobe initially didn't publish a specification for. From the 1980s up until roughly the early 2000s or so, if you were working in desktop publishing professionally, you were probably using Type 1 fonts.
Other companies didn't want Adobe to have a monopoly on vector-based fonts or desktop publishing, of course; Apple created the TrueType format in the early 90s and licensed it to Microsoft, which used it in Windows 3.1 and later versions. Adobe and Microsoft later collaborated on a new font format called OpenType that could replace both TrueType and PostScript Type 1, and by the mid-2000s, it had been released as an open standard and had become the predominant font format used across most operating systems and software. For a while after that, apps that had supported PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to support them, with some exceptions (Microsoft Office for Windows dropped support for Type 1 fonts in 2013). But now we're reaching an inflection point; Adobe ended support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in January 2023, a couple of years after announcing the change. Yesterday, a Microsoft Office for Mac update deprecated Type 1 font support for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook for Mac (plus the standalone versions of those apps in Office 2019 and 2021). The LibreOffice suite, otherwise a good way to open ancient Word documents, stopped supporting Type 1 fonts in the 5.3 release in mid-2022.
If you began using Adobe and Microsoft's productivity apps at some point in the last 10 or 15 years and you've stuck mostly with the default fonts -- either the ones included with the software or the ones from Adobe's extensive font library -- it's not too likely that you've been using a Type 1 font unintentionally. For these kinds of users, this change will be effectively invisible. But if you install and manage your own fonts and you've been using the same ones for a while, it's possible that you created a document in 2022 that you simply won't be able to open in 2023. The change will also cause problems if you open and work with decades-old files with any kind of regularity; files that use Type 1 fonts will begin generating lots of "missing font" messages, and the substitution OpenType fonts that apps might try to use instead can introduce layout issues. You'll also either need to convert any specialized PostScript Type 1 font that you may have paid for in the past or pay for an equivalent OpenType alternative.
Other companies didn't want Adobe to have a monopoly on vector-based fonts or desktop publishing, of course; Apple created the TrueType format in the early 90s and licensed it to Microsoft, which used it in Windows 3.1 and later versions. Adobe and Microsoft later collaborated on a new font format called OpenType that could replace both TrueType and PostScript Type 1, and by the mid-2000s, it had been released as an open standard and had become the predominant font format used across most operating systems and software. For a while after that, apps that had supported PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to support them, with some exceptions (Microsoft Office for Windows dropped support for Type 1 fonts in 2013). But now we're reaching an inflection point; Adobe ended support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in January 2023, a couple of years after announcing the change. Yesterday, a Microsoft Office for Mac update deprecated Type 1 font support for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook for Mac (plus the standalone versions of those apps in Office 2019 and 2021). The LibreOffice suite, otherwise a good way to open ancient Word documents, stopped supporting Type 1 fonts in the 5.3 release in mid-2022.
If you began using Adobe and Microsoft's productivity apps at some point in the last 10 or 15 years and you've stuck mostly with the default fonts -- either the ones included with the software or the ones from Adobe's extensive font library -- it's not too likely that you've been using a Type 1 font unintentionally. For these kinds of users, this change will be effectively invisible. But if you install and manage your own fonts and you've been using the same ones for a while, it's possible that you created a document in 2022 that you simply won't be able to open in 2023. The change will also cause problems if you open and work with decades-old files with any kind of regularity; files that use Type 1 fonts will begin generating lots of "missing font" messages, and the substitution OpenType fonts that apps might try to use instead can introduce layout issues. You'll also either need to convert any specialized PostScript Type 1 font that you may have paid for in the past or pay for an equivalent OpenType alternative.
As the great philosopher Butt-Head once said: (Score:2)
Let's go break something!
Good. (Score:3, Informative)
If anyone is still using files that are using PostScript Type 1 all these years after OpenType has been available, then they get what they get. This has been a solved problem for literally a decade, and there's been several years of warning on this. Let's not Y2K this thing, and instead just realize that your blu-ray player cannot play your VHS tapes, and at some point it becomes far more expensive to keep dusty and unused 30 year old code around and maintained than the over-estimated pain of kicking it out to sea on an ice floe.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yepp. (Score:3)
I side with this perspective.
Adobe and MS are known to regularly lie and break things deliberately to sell more software and subscriptions. I doubt that keeping some form of support for these older files and be it just with a separate import function would've required any additional maintenance effort of behalf of these companies.
Since I don't trust both of them for anything mission critical and I also don't use any paid licence fonts anymore - Go die in a fire, Linotype! - this isn't my problem, but for pe
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends what the rendering logic does. For example, LibreOffice has an export to PDF feature. Does the renderer offer the option to export the geometry in a format that LibreOffice can save as a PDF?
All that code needs to be maintained and tested. Looking at the commit message when LibreOffice dropped it, it seems that they switched to a new rendering engine and it didn't have Type 1 font support. Nobody thought it was worth adding either.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything that can correctly render a standard-compliant PDF needs to be able to render Type1 and yes, there will be a lot of people upset if old PDFs just break as that's the primarily selling point of PDF after all.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sure there *are* some PDFs out there with type-1 fonts in them,
Re: (Score:2)
TrueType is 30 years old, and OpenType was designed by Adobe to replace PS1 fonts, and is nearly as old .. ..the rendering logic is also going away Adobe have said ...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that's quite true. OpenType supports glyphs made from either cubic splines (as used by PostScript) or quadratic splines (as used by TrueType), so you need support for rasterizing both types of splines. But a PostScript font contains PostScript language source code that issues spline-drawing commands when executed in a PostScript interpreter, whereas an OpenType fon
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Good. (Score:1)
Have never understood this attitude.
If the code works, is modular and neatly written, how much "maintenance" is actually required?
Software development has become so much like fast fashion, Rust is so in this season, but have you heard of Carbon? I wouldn't be caught dead with a Postscript renderer, have you tried Wayland?
Well thought-out systems like Postscript don't really need to be replaced, none of the newer stuff is objectively better, and most of it is worse. Worse in design, and worse in implementati
Re: Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
No active maintenance doesn't mean you don't still have to spend effort to test for regression breaks, using data and tools that get more obsolete every year for a small and smaller numember of people. At some point, it just ain't worth it. No code is 'free' to keep around.
Re: Good. (Score:1)
There are plenty of mature tools in use every day that have barely had their code touched in years to decades. Many common Unix shells have very few changes over time, the FreeBSD user land probably still has a bunch of code that goes back to Research Unix.
A lot of software "maintenance" is make-work, pure and simple.
At my work we are doing some heavy numerical analysis with libraries that were written in the 70s and 80s in FORTRAN. It's never been re-written because it works, and fundamental physics doesn'
Re: (Score:3)
I am sometimes amused by analytical software that still refers to input data as a 'deck'. But it does it's job well, so why change it?
Re: (Score:2)
There are plenty of mature tools in use every day that have barely had their code touched in years to decades.
Do any of them have Adobe or Microsoft copyrights on them?
Any at all?
So maybe bringing up examples of hardened UNIX services that never blindly interact with font files who's specifications incorporate executable code and largely static data analysis libraries with incredibly strict input filtering aren't the best examples in this context?
Re: (Score:2)
Eh.
Kind of, but this code is going to be very stable, they ought to have automated tests and, importantly, they can't get rid of the majority of the actually complex bits of the code because Type1 is basically part of the OTF spec. All this is doing is preventing them feeding a standalone T1 into the T1 renderer rather than once from inside an OTF file.
That is really not a complicated thing for an even vaguely well designed piece of software and very easy to write a regression test for: convert the T1 font
Re: (Score:2)
The devil is in the details. I don't have the details. I suspect you know more about it than I do, but my general feeling is nobody other than the person making the decision has the details - which may (and rightfully so) include non-technical considerations we have no stake in.
Re: Good. (Score:5, Informative)
Just because it's nice and modular doesn't mean it doesn't need maintenance.
Especially code that was written 30 years ago. Back then coding attitudes were a little different, so you might have this nice module, but deep down inside is a buffer overflow waiting to be found.
You have to remember PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language, and font exploits are extremely common. For something that is used very little, this is a large security exploit surface.
Remember, some bugs have lasted decades. before being found, and in this world where malware is a thing, closing attack surfaces seem like a good idea.
Re: Good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Building a brand new and untested attack surface is an odd way to do it though.
I have always found it HIGHLY suspicious that Adobe claims they created Postscript from first principles when anyone who learned FORTH first can't help but think "this is FORTH with vector drawing functions added".
Re: (Score:2)
Building a brand new and untested attack surface is an odd way to do it though.
Except the point of building the new thing was not to address the security concerns of the old one. The fact is the brand new attack surface was built for other reasons. Result: There are now two attack surfaces.
It would be concerning it that meant an immediate drop of support for the old one. Replacing a security problem with something untested is a bad idea, but we're not talking about something untested here. We're talking about something that has been in use and maintained and debugged over decades. Cal
Re: (Score:2)
It is certainly correct to call it a LESS tested attack surface though.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a concatenative programming language so it looks similar, but the basic idea is much older
Re: (Score:2)
Also, most of the keywords are the same. And the particulars of the syntax. So much so that a few trivial aliases will make Postscript run a FORTH program.
Re: (Score:2)
I have programmed in FORTH and in Postscript. I guess you haven't. For example, you seem to be unaware that FORTH has floating point as an addon. Personally I stick to integer. It also has arrays and strings.
Re: (Score:2)
So are you lying now or when you described the two as the same language?
I have also programmed in Turbo Pascal and UCSD Pascal. Turbo C, K&R C, and also the GNU dialect.
Not only have I programmed in FORTH, I have ported AN interpreter. You are hyper focusing on implementation details. The fact is, a FORTH programmer can look at Postscript and se exactly what is going on. They can even likely alter a Postscript program without actually learning Postscript's odd dialect.
Modern C++ is more different to C than Postscript is to FORTH.
Re: (Score:2)
and by "building a brand new and untested attack surface" you really mean "discontinue a 30+ year old attack surface that has been successfully exploited several times, in favor of using a 10+ year old far-more-modern font engine that takes into account modern software security principles and has the ability to do everything the old PostScript Type 1 engine could do, more securely"
Seriously, OpenType has existed and flourished in all professional publication environments and all operating systems and word p
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, all seems reasonable in theory until you realize they're just closing one heavily vetted attack surface in favor of a brand new barely tested one that they've already sold a bunch of zero-day exploits and backdoors for to organized crime and various foreign government entities. And they get to charge everyone for new fonts and tools all over again.
Re: (Score:2)
How, exactly, is OpenType "brand new" when ISO accepted it as an official standard in 2007?
I guess that's "brand new" in geologic time scales, but definitely not in information technology contexts.
Re: (Score:2)
Especially code that was written 30 years ago. Back then coding attitudes were a little different, so you might have this nice module, but deep down inside is a buffer overflow waiting to be found.
So then fix the buffer overflow instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch and introducing X number of new bugs and buffer overflows.
Seriously, every time I hear someone use "sEcUrItY" as an excuse to throw out everything and start over, I immediately assume that they are either completely clueless when it comes to actual security, or they just want to piss all over someone else's code simply because they didn't write it themselves.
Re: Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially code that was written 30 years ago. Back then coding attitudes were a little different, so you might have this nice module, but deep down inside is a buffer overflow waiting to be found.
So then fix the buffer overflow instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch and introducing X number of new bugs and buffer overflows.
That would exactly be what he referred to as "maintenance"
Re: (Score:3)
While PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language a Type1 font is a general PostScript program and thus does *NOT* require a Turing complete interpreter. In that respect, Type1 PostScript fonts are safer than TrueType fonts because they have a bytecode that has to be run to hint the font. A Type 3 PostScript font can I think include arbitrary PostScript but we are not talking about Type 3 fonts as outside a full PostScript interpreter very little supports it. Typically it is used for subsetting a T
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hear Hear!
It amazes me to see people ready to declare software dead because nobody has updated it for a while. That CAN mean it's dead, but that can also mean it is feature complete, bug free, and well suited to purpose.
Re: (Score:2)
When there is no replacement because every one is happy with it ...it's not dead .. it's time
When the better replacement is 25 years old
Re: (Score:2)
But if it can cause problems when you make it go away, it has not been properly replaced.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's just say any bug that is at all likely to bite someone on the ass already has and got fixed.
Re: (Score:2)
And when the next security exploit comes out in that code that apparently nobody ever needs to test or maintain? Are you going to say "well gosh, let's give Adobe and Microsoft a break on that, because they kept that 30+ year old crap around despite the publisher wanting to do away with it but I wanted to pitch a fit about it..."
My guess is "no" because you'll want to bitch about that too. And we all know there have never been any PostScipt font exploits [brucert.org.bn] ever [blogspot.com]...
Re: (Score:2)
OpenType supports both Type1 and TrueType font data. Let that sink in.
there's been several years of warning on this
Oh, yeah, the talk of the water cooler in offices around the globe. Ugh...
Re: Good. (Score:2)
If opentype fonts support type 1 font data (and that support isn't going away) someone should write a program to convert a type 1 font to a opentype font with type 1 data.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
I think you mean GIF. And if they pronounce it "JIFF", then they deserve what they get - burning in a corner of hell consisting of an endless 16 frame loop of 8-bit fire.
Re: (Score:1)
Migraines?
I *hate* compression artifacts. We've had reasonably good lossless image compression since the mid nineties, and your bandwidth is not *that* limited. You waste more bandwidth serving unnecessary Javascript libraries that your code doesn't even need, than you save by using JPEG images instead of PNG.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I get some old documentation PDF and it's unreadable due to unsupported fonts - what do you think I shall do then?
Re: (Score:3)
So if I get some old documentation PDF and it's unreadable due to unsupported fonts - what do you think I shall do then?
Download an old version of Adobe Reader from the numerous websites that offer these. Maybe there are better ways, but this is the most obvious one.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds like an awesome way to make sure you get exploited through one of the zillion severe security vulnerabilities in old versions of Adobe Reader.
Re: (Score:2)
That sounds like an awesome way to make sure you get exploited through one of the zillion severe security vulnerabilities in old versions of Adobe Reader.
Well, the idea was to read "old documentation PDFs", no? You can always feed them to Virustotal or something before giving them to old, security hole-infested Acrobat Reader.
Alternatively, use a throwaway VM.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, if you have had a trustworthy copy of the PDF for a long enough time. And if you're scrupulous about uninstalling the old version before opening any new PDFs. But there are a bunch of questionable web sites -- and also reputable but occasionally compromised vendor sites -- that host really old documentation PDFs, so I wouldn't open any newly downloaded PDF with an old Adobe Reader even if the PDF swears it's a really old one that legitimately uses a Type 1 font format.
Some government standards speci
Re: (Score:2)
I have an install of Acrobat Reader 6 that I drag from one PC to the next because 1) it always just works, 2) it doesn't require a reinstall (who the hell knows where the original is) 3) it's not infested with advertising and other annoyances.
That it occasionally barfs back a newer PDF and I have to open it with Okular instead is a small price to pay.
Vulnerabilities? These seem to be mostly theoretical, and probably less of a practical issue than whatever flaws are built into newer versions. Disallow script
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
PDF files typically embed the fonts (or rather, the specific subset of font glyphs) they use. So PDFs will generally continue to render just fine.
Per Adobe's own advice:
This is primarily an issue for document creation going forward. Though it goes without saying that you should still avoid using Type 1 fonts.
Re: (Score:2)
The only time PDFs become unreadable is if the old unsupported font is missing the character set, e.g. your old unsupported font was in Chinese and you have no Chinese system fonts installed. Otherwise you may just end up with the wrong font displayed.
The underlying text is still there. The PDF will also open, and in the very VERY worst case you can use a PDF tool with touchup support to change the font to something readable. But nearly always this happens automatically for you anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Any reasonable PDF app should simply substitute the font for a similar one. That happens all the time with PDFs that don't have the font embedded, or where the font is defined as some generic one like "sans serif".
Re: (Score:1)
So if I get some old documentation PDF and it's unreadable due to unsupported fonts - what do you think I shall do then?
Would understanding that documentation be dependent on pixel-perfect rendering of the design? Because that is what you will lose with substitution fonts.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)
This is a solved problem. It's actually why PostScript fonts are a thing.
Adobe, who created PostScript, knew fonts were going to be "a thing" and built in multiple ways depending on how the font is licensed from the foundry.
First, the font may be non-embeddable and non-transferable - this means to reproduce the document, the printer (or raster image processor, the thing that actually processes the document into a raster image) needs to have the font locally. That's why you see printers sold with "10 fonts included!" or can buy "font expansion cartridges".
Sometimes you can have the font be transferrable, so you can send a document from the a computer that has the font, and the computer will upload the font to the printer for that print job.
And sometimes you're lucky and it's embeddable, so the document contains the font in it so it can be printed using the built-in font.
PDF has the same restrictions - it's why PDF readers often come with default generic fonts. If the font is not available because it's not in the document, and it's not on the host system, then PDF will apply a substitute font in its place.
Adobe is the leader in font substitution technology - you may have heard of a piece of software called Adobe Type Manager, which in the printing industry was an essential piece of software because it could figure out what fonts could be substituted to preserve the look of the document the best - the characteristics of the font were stored and ATM would figure out the best substitution it had on had based on those characteristics. PDF exploits a similar technology when choosing its substitute fonts.
So no, y our old PDFs will open just fine as long as the font information within is accurate as a substitution can be used
Re: (Score:2)
Read it anyway because any PDF reader worth executing knows how to offer substitute fonts when fonts are missing, if they aren't directly embedded in the PDF file?
Re: (Score:2)
This has been a solved problem for literally a decade, and there's been several years of warning on this
Go back and re-read what you wrote. What "problem" is being "solved" by removing support for a font format? Think before you answer.
Also, time past means nothing. The words "deprecation" "deprecated" and "deprecating" are bad words in the realm of technology standards. They should never be used ever. Someone trying to claim their new shiny covers all of the bases, and that the old standard isn't needed anymore, should face a rigorous mental health screening. There's always corner cases, and people needin
Re: (Score:2)
What "problem" is being "solved" by removing support for a font format? Think before you answer.
An actively exploited attack surface, which has been effectively exploited for years. Did you think before asking?
Did you think before writing any of what you wrote? Your logic has us still maintaining 16-bit real mode on modern CPUs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh really? [brucert.org.bn]
Glad to know that there are no Type-1 font vulnerabilities [github.io] because you said so, and then were a belligerent fuckwit about it to boot.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Documents that are more than 20 years old are clearly unnecessary cruft. Who knows a person from that time anyway and can they still speak coherently?
Well, I do, and no, they can't speak coherently anymore. That's why I need to be able to read their thoughts from the times when they were lucid.
Are you sure you would even understand the language in those ancient documents?
As one with a PhD in classical languages, I surely am :)
Re: (Score:2)
If anyone is still using files that are using PostScript Type 1 all these years after OpenType has been available, then they get what they get. This has been a solved problem for literally a decade
What exactly was the problem that was solved? There was no problem, until MS and Adobe decided to create one.
Re: (Score:2)
With this attitude we will never have a proper document archive format. What is 30 years? It's not even a lifetime.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean besides the 20-year old PDF document standard that was built to deal with font substitution properly?
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
If anyone is still using files that are using PostScript Type 1 all these years after OpenType has been available, then they get what they get. This has been a solved problem for literally a decade, and there's been several years of warning on this. Let's not Y2K this thing, and instead just realize that your blu-ray player cannot play your VHS tapes, and at some point it becomes far more expensive to keep dusty and unused 30 year old code around and maintained than the over-estimated pain of kicking it out to sea on an ice floe.
Archivists enter the chat.
I agree that if anyone is still making new documents with old fonts they're utterly daft. However loads of organisations may have archived documents that need to be kept for decades, libraries, government and financial institutions to name some of the bigger ones. This may be hundreds of thousands of documents in multiple formats that aren't a simple matter to convert (doubly so if the material on them is sensitive).
Re: (Score:2)
And those archivists are going to maintain them as editable digital files? Or perhaps they are going to make them more permanent by flattening it into a bitmapped image with searchable metadata that doesn't use font files at all, while also shrinking the document size on disk through image compression, and making it possible to move to real archival formats such as microfilm?
Re: (Score:1)
Three decades. TrueType fonts have worked on screen and on paper, as close to identically as the available resolution of any given display medium allows, for three decades. Even if you waited for OpenType, that's been two and a half decades.
I haven't seen a PostScript font since the Windows for Workgroups era (the pre-X era for Mac users; before apt-get was introduced, for Linux users; before cascading stylesheets, in www terms). I didn't know it
Idiotic (Score:2)
Yes, Type 1 should not be used anymore. But what do MS and Adobe actually gain here? It is not like old fonts will need a lot of maintenance of customer support. It is not like they are large on disk or anything, being vector fonts. It is not like these fonts need any kind of special provisions in the PS interpreter, they just get loaded and then the glyphs get executed. (PostScript models a glyph as a subroutine call.)
This strikes me as a move that has no benefits but does harm to some people. The proverbi
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That may run into copyright problems. Both the font and the implementation may be copyrighted and this conversion may be illegal.
Re: (Score:2)
This is indeed the problem, and it will remain a problem for even longer than having to pay licensing fees for PostScript could become a problem — because PostScript obviously predates all of the commercial fonts.
I also get to feel smug about being able to use PostScript fonts on Linux, so that's a win for my personal choices ;)
Re: Idiotic (Score:2)
It seems likely licences would be the issue. Simple conversion wouldn't be a copyright issue - it happens in everyday use of fonts. It'll depend on whether the licence permits conversion beyond intended use.
I could sell you a PNG, with a licence forbidding conversion into any other format - even if for personal use. Copyright wouldn't come into it.
Re: (Score:2)
Why doesn't Microsoft include a conversion utility?? That would solve the issue. You can't open it but you can convert it and then open it.
Because it's not needed. Software will already perform font substitution for you. You absolutely can open PDFs / Word documents with the required fonts missing on your system. It just won't look 100% true to the original.
Re: Idiotic (Score:1)
Why should Type 1 not be used? Postscript has never not been useful, it's an excellent way to generalize the rendering pipeline, and on modern hardware it's even better.
Funnily enough, the Cairo rendering library which is used in many toolkits and graphics packages provides a very Postscript-like API, which is for good reason.
It was a well thought-out system that was ahead of it's time and has only improved with technology.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it may be difficult to get more new fonts or they may not be available at, e.g. a printing outfit (requires adjusted fonts). Not that big a deal in many cases, but they are obsolete. If you just use your own Type 1 or you have made sure the Type 1 you use have modern implementations, then no issue.
Re: (Score:1)
They gain forcing a bunch of old megacorps to buy a bunch of brand new font licenses and licenses for an entire replacement suite of accompanying tools.
Re: (Score:2)
But what do MS and Adobe actually gain here? It is not like old fonts will need a lot of maintenance of customer support.
Fonts are a literal security nightmare that have been actively exploited many times in the past. Leaving it in place is leaving an attack surface exposed for the benefit of literally no one (since no one has used these fonts for decades).
Re: (Score:2)
However not a Type1 PostScript font. You are thinking of TrueType fonts that have a byte code program that has to be run in order to hint the font. As such you have to run arbitrary byte code in every font you render.
This is not an issue with Type1 PostScript fonts where the hints are that a series of definitions aka "hints" that the renderer uses to keep the font looking "good" on low resolution devices. Basically think of it making sure of a way of keeping the number of pixels in the vertical bars of the
Re: (Score:2)
Complete bullshit for PostScript fonts. A PostScript font is just a piece of PostScript code and about as dangerous as a PostScript document. Yes, there are dangers and a PostScript interpreter needs to properly do security-sandboxing, but fonts do not extend the attack surface at all.
Meh (Score:1)
Remember the ad slogan (Score:2)
Adobe! You'll shit a brick!
Obsolete (Score:2)
My fonts folder is some 20 years old, moved across multiple Linux desktops and contains only .ttf and .otf files. Anyway, if a need would arise do convert, there is the FOSS option FontForge, it can open Type1 and save as OTF.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, if a need would arise do convert, there is the FOSS option FontForge, it can open Type1 and save as OTF.
Good luck using your shiny tool when you have an old document whose layout must be preserved perfectly. Or a bunch of such documents.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah and mine is 30 years old and has a full set of the 35 standard PostScript fonts as Type1. My current printer takes PostScript directly so not quite as useful as in the past but get of my lawn.
appears to be another money grab (Score:2)
No compatibility for your old fonts -- instead you need to purchase them again. How modern.