Do you have old PDFs or docs with Postscript fonts? They might have become uneditable.

[thewayne]

First, a little explanation about Postscript.

Back in the early days of laser printers, in the '80s, Postscript appeared. It is actually a programming language for lasers that used math to describe vector fonts that allowed the explosion of desktop publishing to begin (as a programming geek, I have a book on it!). There are basically two types of fonts or graphics, vector and raster. A vector font is described using math or a formula, and as a result can be rendered at any size, from one point up to a size beyond imagination, and it will be the exact same design regardless. A raster is an image, and it may look fine at the resolution at which it was scanned or smaller, but when you start enlarging it, the quality of it falls off dramatically. You've all seen horribly pixelated examples of this, even if you didn't know what the technical details of it were.

One interesting thing about Postscript is the language would allow you to define a line that was one point wide and infinitely long! It would continue printing on that laser until the printer died, as long as you kept feeding it paper.

So, back to uneditable documents. And a little info on how PDFs work.

When you create a PDF, the font definition is embedded inside the PDF file. When you open that file on a computer other than the one that you created it on, your PDF reader program, which may or may not be Adobe Acrobat, says "This file contains Font X!" and looks to see if that font is loaded. If it is, then all is well and the font is loaded and the document continues processing for display. If Font X is not installed on the system, the PDF also contains information on Font X's "family", let's say that font is part of the Courier family, so the computer says to itself 'I don't have Font X, but I have lots of Courier fonts, so I'll grab one of those and continue rendering the document!'

The computer is happy and the document comes up on your screen, or gets spat out by your printer.

Now the problem. The earliest form of fonts in PDFs were Postscript, known as Type 1. And Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has pulled the Type 1 fonts from Office 365 as of the middle of this month. This includes both Mac and Windows. Open Office had already pulled support. If you bought Postscript from a third party, you should still be good.

According to Adobe, from the article, "[the] PDF and EPS files with Type 1 fonts will continue to render properly, as long as those fonts are "placed for display or printing as graphic elements." That text will not be editable, however."

Also, "If you want to see what kinds of fonts you have installed on your system, Windows and macOS will show you that information with a little tweaking. In macOS, open the Font Book app and switch to List view and font formats will be listed under the "Format" column on the right. In Windows 10 or 11, open the legacy Control Panel, select Fonts, switch to Details view using the button in the upper-right corner, right-click the top row, and check the "Font Type" box. PostScript fonts can also be identified by their file extension if you can see it, typically either .pfb or .pfm."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/microsoft-adobe-and-others-have-dropped-support-for-old-postscript-fonts/

Comments

[foreverdawning]

Of course they won't be editable. That's frustrating.

[thewayne]

Theoretically, if you could find an older Mac or Windows machine, you could still work with them.  Like myself, I'm maintaining a 2015 MacBook Pro for its old OS as there is ONE program that I need that will not work on any newer OS.  Die-hards will go to some length when they need to. If this is really a person's field, there are probably substitutions that can be made.  I am not a font or DTP expert, far out of my area.

[kraig]

Virtualization means that older machine is "do you have install media?" away, thankfully, but still it can be troublesome. I used a VM Windows 98 install with Word for Windows 2ish to uplift some old WordPerfect files I had, school papers, and then into something newer. It was not worth the effort, it turns out while I wrote well for an undergrad, I was still an undergrad. I got some old D&D stuff I'd written back then too, so it wasn't a total waste of effort. :)

[thewayne]

My problem with trying to recover old files is some of my stuff was written in Borland Sprint word processor and I don't know anything that reads that!  I physically have old Macs that could theoretically put back in service, but sometimes getting software masters can be iffy.

[dewline]

I am not entirely happy about this for various reasons. Not sure if it really affects anything I've done and to what degree if it does.

Still...

[thewayne]

The one thing that the article doesn't go in to is why support for Type 1 is being withdrawn!  Just because it's old?  Is there a problem with the base Postscript code?  What?!

[disneydream06]

Sounds like Math and/or Science to me. LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[mtbc]

Seems odd that they are renderable yet uneditable, I wonder if something like the kerning gets figured in the PS→PDF conversion so it can't re-kern or something.

[mtbc]

Ohh, unless it's that there might just be some subset of the font embedded and they're worried, in editing, you'll type a character not in that subset because it wasn't already used in the document, and they can't pull that character from the system any more.

[thewayne]

Yeah, dunno.  I know very little about the mysteries of DTP and the inner workings of PDFs, that stuff is far outside my skill set.

[silveradept]

Yet more bitrot, intentionally produced. Of course, that's also another strike against a format like PDF, among all the other strikes. It probably was a great form to use for documents at the time of the invention, but I feel like documents that leave the formatting up to another file or the reader are much better future-proofed against things like this.

[thewayne]

The problem being that if the document were made in, say, Quark XPress, are there still programs that would read that?  Except maybe another DTP program, which 99% of the public won't have installed?  I think PDF was an excellent alternative to preserve a semblance of the document's layout and to be quite independent.  Microsoft pulling support for Type 1 without any justification that I saw really doesn't make sense.  If they want to claim licensing costs, then it's old enough to be out of patent: develop an open source compatible alternative that directly meshes and release it free for any platform. 

[silveradept]

If PDF editing software were more widespread, I'd feel better about it as a format, but it seems to be something that was designed to be freely read, but not freely edited. I don't like it much, and the more I learn about inaccessible PDFs, the less I love the format.

[thewayne]

I agree about PDF editing software, it largely sucks.  I have Adobe's PDF software, both from personal collection and from work, and it's just terrible stuff.  It's neither fish nor fowl, not DTP nor WP, thus does neither particularly well.  Quite annoying.  Now, I my recipes are usually created using Open Office, saved in ODF format, then also printed as a PDF so that I can easily send a copy to someone.  But then when I edit the recipe, I edit the ODF and then recreate the PDF, I don't edit the PDF.

[silveradept]

When that happens, though, there's two versions of the document to maintain, and if the PDF is the only one that's ever preserved and archived, a lot of the useful information gets lost, and often becomes inaccessible. I'd rather maintain one document, with my desired stylesheet attached, and keep the information accessible, than stuff things in an ishy format to preserve style choices.