General considerations

Family & Single Fonts | Installing on Mac OS 9 | Installing on Mac OS X | Installing on Windows

General Considerations

Unpacking

Before using a font you licensed from Linotype, it is necessary to unpack the archive in which the font files are stored for downloading. If you purchased a CD containing fonts, you will find the font files directly, unpacked, in the respective subdirectories of your CD after inserting the CD into your computer’s CD drive.

For the process of unpacking the downloaded archives, please see the respective sections for the operating system on which you intend to install and use the fonts.

Font formats

Fonts are produced in different formats (e.g. OpenType, TrueType, PostScript) and for different platforms (Windows, Apple Mac).

Thus when installing fonts you downloaded from Linotype.com several restrictions apply depending on the format and platform a font was produced for.

Attention: Take care to install font families in a single format only, OpenType, PostScript or TrueType.

• OpenType

  
  
  The OpenType format was introduced in order to make font files easily interchangeable within the different platforms. This results in the fact that an OpenType font consists of only one data file on both platforms, Mac and Windows, either ending with *.ttf (containing TrueType outlines) or *.otf (containing PostScript outlines).
  
  Modern operating systems handle OpenType fonts natively on their own. However, it may be that for older operating system versions (e.g. older than Windows 2000 or Mac OS X) special tools are needed for installing OpenType fonts, e.g. ATM (Adobe Type Manager). This fact will be mentioned in the respective section of the following pages.
  
  Windows NT 4.0, 98 and Me support only OpenType fonts that use TrueType outlines. For OpenType fonts that contain PostScript outlines, „Adobe Type Manager (ATM) Light“ 4.1 or „Adobe Type Manager (ATM) Deluxe“ 4.1 has to be installed. Windows 95, 98 and Me applications (apart from Microsoft Office and some other programs) do not support the extended character set of OpenType fonts.
  
  Linotype supports OpenType fonts only with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and Mac OS X.
  
  
• TrueType
  
  The TrueType font format is handled natively by all mentioned platforms and operating systems. However, you need to purchase TrueType fonts for the platform on which you want to use them (e.g. Windows TrueType, Mac TrueType), since the binary data format differs on both platforms.
  
  
• PostScript
  
  The handling of fonts in PostScript format varies between the different platforms. Please read on in the section of the following pages concerning the operating system you want to install the fonts for.