User`s manual
TransType Pro
30
S e t t i ng Co nve r s i o n Opt i o ns
After you have added fonts to the Source list (and the resulting font names
have appeared in the Destination list) TransType usually is ready to begin
conversion using the default settings. But sometimes you may need to
change the conversion options (particularly the destination font format),
the methods that TransType uses to reencode fonts and, if you are
converting PC fonts to Macintosh, the styles of the generated fonts and
their placement in suitcases.
Conversion of fonts between three main font formats – PostScript Type 1,
OpenType PS and TrueType – is the feature that makes TransType Pro an
advanced product. This conversion is not trivial and demands many
options to be set correctly. Sometimes it is not possible to convert a font
from one format to another without loss of font quality. That is why we will
describe format conversion separately.
Reencoding of fonts is a very important feature of TransType Pro too. This
is necessary because Windows and Macintosh use different encodings to
map codes in the 0-255 range to characters located in the font. Usually the
first 128 characters are encoded the same way, but other characters,
located in the 128-255 code range are not. Moreover, encoding of fonts is
highly dependent on the language for which the font was designed and in
no language is the Macintosh encoding the same as the one used in
Windows.
The method which the two systems use to identify font styles is also very
different. On the Macintosh, fonts that comprise a font family are grouped
into a font suitcase. On Windows all the font files are separate and the
system links them into the font family using style-identification flags set in
each font.
We will give you a detailed description of each operation you can apply to
customize the font conversion process. The descriptions are grouped in
sections for each platform/format combination.
But we will describe the most common and simple setting for the
conversion process here in this section.