How to use very old fonts in System 7?

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basilisk2user
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How to use very old fonts in System 7?

Post by basilisk2user »

So I managed to find a download of System 2, and within this disk image is a suitcase file simply titled "Fonts" that, when I opened it with ResEdit, shows some resources that clearly appear to be the original "city" fonts, before the majority of them were jettisoned in System 7 (save for Geneva, Chicago and Monaco). The really cool ones like Cairo, San Francisco, Venice, and one I had never heard of with a name like Tale Spin(?).

The strange thing is that when I double-click on the suitcase in Finder, it shows no fonts inside. I tried putting this supposedly empty suitcase (which nonetheless has a file size of about 140K) into the Fonts folder. I even restarted, but nothing new shows up in the font menus of various applications, and Suitcase throws an error when scanning the fonts folder, saying "The suitcase 'Fonts' contains no fonts."

So I'm guessing that somehow I have to extract these from the suitcase's resource fork in ResEdit to use as proper System 7 suitcases, if this is even possible. Does anyone know of a way this can be done, so that I can have the original Susan Kare set in my 7.5 environment? Is it tricky and technical if so?
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adespoton
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Re: How to use very old fonts in System 7?

Post by adespoton »

You need a copy of Font/DA Mover. ResEdit could also do it, but I can't recall which resources you'd need to grab, as the issue is that the old font suitcases don't include some specific resources matching the FONT and FOND resources, IIRC. The OS uses these to handle the metadata for the fonts so it knows what resources to extract/write.

That said, someone already extracted these, as well as the originals from the Twiggy system (which uses a slightly different resource layout than what you get in System 0.85 and later). So you can probably search for them and find them online.

System 6 came with Font/DA Mover, if you can't find a copy.

Otherwise, you'll have to just use ResEdit to extract the resources you find in a normal suitcase, and make a new one with the resources you rip. Easiest way to do this is to take an existing suitcase and just copy/paste the resources onto it.

[edit] Once you have the suitcases, you can just drop them in the Fonts folder, and they should show up. A neat trick I used to use: you can actually use the Fonts folder for loading almost any resource; I used to drop my FKEYs in font suitcases and drop them in the Fonts folder to add/remove them instead of resorting to ResEdit hackery of the System file.
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