Windows – Fonts without file extension, install on Windows

For some Mac fonts, the font information is stored entirely in the resource fork of the file. On Mac OS X, such fonts look like normal files in Finder, but from tools like ls (and anything else that uses the POSIX layer) these look like zero byte files.

The __MACOSX/._* files from the Zip file are AppleDouble encoded versions of the combination of the resource fork and some extra Finder information from the original files. AppleDouble files are used by Mac OS X when storing files that have a resource fork or Finder info on filesystems that do not support resource forks and Finder info (here Zip is considered a filesystem).

I am not a Windows user and my searches did not turn on any pre-made tools for this. I did find a set of tools that might work. It would be best to run them on a Mac, but they might work on Windows, too.

If you have access to a Mac

• extract your Zip archive on that Mac (double-click it, do not use the command-line unzip) and
• use a tool like Fondu to extract the TTF (or whatever) from the resource fork
  • (I just found the fondu, I have never used it before; caveat emptor)

If you do not have access to a Mac, you may still be able to use fondu, but you will need to compile fondu yourself (it looks like it is possible to build it on Linux, so you might also be able to build it in (e.g.) Cygwin). The next problem is that fondu does not seem able to read AppleDouble files, so you will have to find something that can extract the bare resource fork from the AppleDouble encoded ._*file. I am not sure which Windows-specific tools might be able to decode AppleDouble, but the Mac::AppleSingleDouble Perl module can do it:

perl -MMac::AppleSingleDouble -e 'for(@ARGV) {
    $a = new Mac::AppleSingleDouble($_);
    if(open $f, ">", $_.".rsrc") {
        binmode $f;
        print $f $a->get_entry(2);
        close $f;
    }
}'__MACOSX/._Webdings
# now I have a __MACOSX/._Webdings.rsrc file from which fondu can extract Webdings.ttf

If you are familiar with building Unix-oid tools, building fondu should be easy. For the Perl bit, you should be able to use the cpan tool that comes with most installations of Perl (or, if you are familiar with the layout and installation of Perl modules, just download the AppleSingleDouble.pm file and put it in an appropriate place).

Type3 fonts are incredibly rare in PDF files. Type3 fonts are actually PDF fonts, in that the glyphs are described in PDF page graphic operators. So you would never encounter a type 3 font outside of a PDF, since only a PDF renderer would know what to do.

1. The glyphs are defined in the object referenced by the CharProcs key. So Object 239 in your last example. The /FontBBox is normally just used for text selection. You could probably just union all all the FontBBoxes.

2. You could check the graphic operators, or even just hash the streams, to find matches. Then perhaps you could synthesize new fonts with the collected fonts. However, you also need to check the encodings. If each font is encoded differently, with different character codes mapping to different glyphs, then you need to go back and also rewrite the page content streams, using the new character codes. Finally, you probably want to keep the ToUnicode mappings correct (if you want to preserve text selection/extraction), which means also tracking character code to unicode mappings and generating new ToUnicode CMaps.

In short, repairing as a post-processing step is non-trivial.

It is typically much better/easier to go back and deal with the root of the issue, when you create the PDF files, and merge, so you don't have the issue.