I got an urgent call from a client yesterday evening. He needed 150 Windows Postscript fonts converted for Mac OS X by next morning. Hooray! Well, for those of you who care to remember, such stuff used to be the domain of rather expensive and cumbersome Software, so rejoicing wasn't exactly what I did. Turns out, though (and that's the reason I'm blogging this) that the situation is far less bleak than back in 1997 when I used to deal with such issues regularily: because now there exists a very fine Open Source solution for font editing (and in my case more importantly) font conversion: FontForge.

It requires X11 to run on Mac OS X but the beauty is, of course, that it can perform conversions also from the command line. But the fun doesn't stop here: it also features its own scripting language and a handy example for batch converting fonts so the potential nightmare of creating those 150 TrueType fonts turned out to be a breeze.