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Review: FontXChange: Elegant & Simple Font Conversion
For years, I’ve been a fan of FontDoctor, from MorrisonSoft. If you had misbehaving fonts causing weird app behavior, slowdowns and glitches, it was (and still is) the app to have. Recently, MorrisonSoft has changed their name to FontGear Inc., but I’m happy to say that the quality of the software remains the same, as evidenced by FontXChange, a slick little app that allows you to easily translate your existing fonts into the type of fonts you need. FontXChange takes what could be a daunting task and reduces it to a few simple mouse clicks. It’s elegant and simple, the way Mac software ought to be.
If you’ve ever ventured beyond the confines of FontBook, the Mac OS X font manager, you know it’s a bit of a jungle out there. You have older PostScript fonts, you have modern TrueType fonts and you have Adobe’s one-size-fits-all OpenType fonts. You have fonts which are supposed to have screen-optimized versions but often don’t. You have fonts which are usable by one app but not another. It’s a giant headache and the more computers you have to deal with, the larger the headache becomes. What you need is something to turn whatever you have into whatever you need and basically, that’s what FontXChange does.
Simply drag a font into the main , specify whether it’s for Windows or Mac and then choose your desired font type, OpenType, TrueType or PostScript type 1. Hitting the “Convert Fonts” button makes a new font faster than you can say, “You mean it’s done?” In my informal testing, individual fonts converted in around 1-2 seconds. Now that’s fast.
It’s also incredibly easy to use. Left in its automatic mode, FontXChange will automatically select the proper type of font encoding for the job at hand. At the same time, it allows encoding to be set manually should you need that option. It offers batch processing, which doesn’t sound like a sexy feature….until you need a couple hundred fonts translated. Then it’s the greatest feature ever. It will even recreate missing screen fonts for your older PostScript fonts, which is really handy.
FontXChange is a joy to use. It does what you want and does it quickly, with zero drama. It’s list price of $99 may look pricey at first blush, but it’s actually less expensive than much of the competition and a mere pittance compared to the cost of re-purchasing your fonts in another format. It will also run on a variety of OSX versions from 10.3-10.5 which is a blessing for older machines.
It’s a really nice piece of software.
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But the question is whether the translated font acts and displays correctly. Truetype fonts are composed of quadratic beziers leading to an excessive number of control points to define a shape versus the lean cubic beziers of a Postscript Type 1. Machine translation between the two is often inexact with an incorrect number of and badly placed control points to define the glyph shape. Human font designers often translate one to the other but will manually tweak the font for optimum results. Did the author of this article crank up a font building program like Fontlab to see if the results, the underlying outline shape, was aesthetically pleasing and accurate? And what of hinting? Both types of fonts store hinting data in different ways. I will presume that Morrisonsoft has done a good job and the data is translated but did the author compare translated fonts with the originals at various sizes to see any deviation in hinting? As to Opentype, while it is a “font” spec, it more closely defines a container that can contain the glyph outline data either as Truetype or as CFF (Postscript Type 2).
i did convert several fonts and compared them to the originals and thought the results were very good. it certainly did as well as my copy of transtype which performs similarly but costs quite a bit more.
Here’s a link to the demo version so you can test it yourself (the above links in the article are wrong):
http://www.fontgear.net/FontXChange.html