Type 1 fonts

[Bruno Voisin]

Some of you may have heard of Adobe's announcement that they're dropping Type 1 font support <https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html>. Apps in the Creative suite will display them but not allow modifying content, and Photoshop won't even display them.

For example, yesterday opening a PDF file from the 90s in Illustrator, and dealing with font substitution upon import (the paper used MathTime), I was greeted with a warning that Illustrator would stop supporting Type 1 fonts by January 2023.

Similarly, the PostScript specification has vanished from Adobe's site, and their PostScript presentation page <https://www.adobe.com/products/postscript.html> now speaks of PostScript in the past tense and writes "Today, Adobe PDF has replaced PostScript as the preferred print file format and is also the dominant format for document sharing and collaboration across devices and platforms".

This all got Ghostscript users worried and gave a thread on the gs-devel list, starting at <https://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2022-December/010594.html>. Given the implications any change of attitude of Ghostscript with respect to Type 1 would have for the TeX world, I thought you'd be interested by the answers one of the Ghostscript developers just gave <https://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2022-December/010596.html>:


Q: Will the ghostscript PDF interpreter continue supporting Type 1 fonts embedded in PDFs?

A: Yes, of course, since type 1 fonts are part of the PDF specification. That's the ISO specification.

In any event we would have to continue interpreting type 1 fonts for compatibility with older versions of PDF even if the specification was to drop support.


Q: Will the ghostscript PS interpreter continue supporting Type 1 fonts embedded in PS or in external files?

A: Again, obviously, yes. Type 1 fonts are part of the PostScript specification and even if a new version of PostScript were to be released (unlikely in the extreme) which dropped such support we would need to retain support for older versions.


Q: Will ghostscript ps2pdf continue being able to support converting PS with embedded or included Type 1 fonts into a PDF with embedded fonts that Acrobat will be able to open without dropping fonts?

A: For as long as the PDF specification retains type 1 fonts, yes. Should the specification change so that a new version does not support type 1 fonts, then targeting that version as output would of course prevent us embedding type 1 fonts.


So let's hope the PDF specification doesn't drop Type 1 one day. Fingers crossed,

Bruno Voisin