Using fonts from a PC on a Mac

Whilst working on a new website design I hit a problem which I am sure a lot of people have had to deal with in the past but for me this was a first.

Christine, my daughter over at http://www.wildemedia.com created a great web site design for me using Adobe Illustrator. I also have Illustrator and you’d think that would be great, same apps, everything's good. Unfortunately not quite. Christine uses Adobe CS4 on a PC and I use CS4 on a Mac. Again you’d think that would be no problem and for the most part it’s not. However, the logo she designed to go with the site used a font that is available on her PC but not on my Mac.

The customer wanted to see some variations on the logo with caps and lower case and different colours.

The file I got from my daughter was all vector graphics, great, but I needed the font. Christine wasn’t available to ask what the font was so I had to go hunting for it. Luckily I remembered a blog post that a Twitter friend had posted on his blog over at http://www.switchmac.com . It was about a tool he found that would give you the name of any font that is embedded in an image. So I went to the web site. I then used Skitch to clip the logo text, save it as a file and upload it to the web site. It told me a number of fonts that it could be. So although I was close, I still couldn’t get the cigar unless I was sure which font it was.

Then I thought, ‘hang on I have a PC here, it may have the font installed’. Sure enough there was the font on the PC. But that’s no good right? So I thought I would go and find where I could get the Mac version of the font. I found a site that wanted $29 for the font. Ok, then I looked for a font conversion tool, I mean, the PC fonts won’t install on a Mac, right? I found such a tool but at $75. It would be cheaper to buy the font.

Then I had a brainwave (I get them occasionally) The font in question was a True Type font and it would appear from what I was reading, the Mac fonts are also True Type. So I decided to try one last thing so I copied the font file from the Fonts folder on the PC and put it on my NAS where the Mac can also see the files stored there.

On the Mac I opened the NAS drive and went to the folder, there was the font file. Just out of curiosity I double clicked the font file, it opened, it saw the file as a font and not only that the dialog box that opened also had an “Install Font” button! So of course I clicked it.

Now I have the font I need on the Mac as well as on the PC. It couldn’t be easier.

Now how the licensing works for this I’m not sure, I just figured that if I own the file on my PC then use it on my Mac that’s good enough.

I’d be interested to know if you already knew about this feature?

Comments

[Kevin]

I always knew they were compatible, but I never really thought of it as a "feature" since they both use the same font type.