Fresh from discontinuing support for the Pantone Colour Library, Adobe has reminded the industry that as of January, the Type 1 font format expire and will no longer be recognised in Adobe Creative Cloud products.
The change was first announced in January last year, but has slipped beneath the radar. Consequently few have audited what documents they hold which use Type 1 fonts and have made provision to convert these to the OpenType format. And there may be millions of documents around the world that use the soon to become extinct format.
The Type 1 format dates back to 1984 and the early days of desktop published and was developed for the PostScript page description language. As this was swept up by the printing industry Type 1 fonts were needed across the industry, spawning Multiple Master versions. It was the de facto format until PDF began to phase out Postscript and the OpenType format was conceived in 1996 as a format that would work with PDF and be equally at home on screen as in print.
Type 1 fonts do not work with browsers or mobile OS. Nor do they work in Photoshop 23, the latest version, sparking a “missing fonts” message. From January the same message will appear in InDesign and Illustrator jobs. Existing PDF files with embedded fonts will print, but will be impossible to edit, to change a price or other small detail for example, as the font will have effectively ceased to exist.
Designers, publishers, corporates and printers having built a library of Type 1 fonts will need to replace these, potentially at great cost. Converting standing fonts to OpenType is likely to infringe licences. There may also be compatibility issues, resulting in different line endings, changes in appearance, incorrect rendition of some characters.
“While not the issue it would have been ten or 15 years ago, this is still a big deal,” says one expert. However, others believe that more than 25% of the fonts that are in use are in the Type 1 format. In many cases this is because the cost of upgrading to OpenType across hundreds of type families was prohibitive. If so then, it will be more so now.
Preflighting applications will be able to check for the presence of Type 1 fonts, and with a suitable extension, will be able to substitute the correct replacement, if present.
