Question:

When I drop the PS font family to TransType's window I get too many files with conflicting names/styles. Many of them are marked red. How can I convert them correctly?


Answer:

These Adobe PS fonts were generated in a special way. We call them ATR-compatible suitcases.


The idea is that the family of, for example, 4 fonts: plain, italic, bold and bold italic is splitted into 4 families: FamilyName, FamilyName Bold, FamilyName Italic, FamilyName Bold Italic. The first one includes 4 references to PS files on the disk (as usual), the bold family includes the reference to the bold typeface, the italic to the italic PS file and so on. As a result, the suitcase contains 4 families with 8 references to fonts but there are still only 4 real PS typefaces in the folder.

When TransType reads the info from an ATR-compatible suitcase it doesn't resolve conflicts and doesn't merge styles so you see every reference in the list. For example, Helvetica folder may include 1 suitcase file and 24 PS font files but the structure of references totally contains 66 items and they all appear in TransType's window.

To convert such a family properly you have to manually remove all duplicate references and correctly name the rest. As a result you should get as many items in the window as many PS files you have in the source folder and then convert the set. Unfortunately there is no automatic way for that.