I’ve been busy beavering away in Xcode and I am now proud to release version 0.3 of DfontSplitter for Mac.

So, here are the release notes:

New Features and Bugfixes

• Now supports the splitting and extracting of TrueType Collection (TTC) files in addition to traditional Mac Datafork (dfont) files.
• The conversion of a .dfont will no longer fail if there is already a TTF of the same name in the same directory; it will now overwrite the existing file.
• Users of Snow Leopard on Intel Core 2 and Xeon Macs will now be running the DfontSplitter application in 64-bit mode.
• Improved error message text.

Known Issues

• Converting TTC files on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) does sometimes run into problems, where the TTC splitting script can’t open the TTC file. The reason for this is currently unclear.
• Moving TTF files that have been extracted from a .dfont over to Windows — please see this workaround.

As always, go across to the DfontSplitter project page to download the new release.

If you’re already using DfontSplitter for Mac, simply go to DfontSplitter > Check for Updates within the application to upgrade to the new release.

UPDATE 2011-05-09: While some particularly stubborn fonts do require this process, users who have previously experienced difficulty with older versions of DfontSplitter should first try with DfontSplitter 0.3.1 or later, which include a possible fix for this issue.

I think I’ve finally found a solution to this annoying error message that Windows gives when you use DfontSplitter to convert some fonts and then try and use those converted fonts in Windows.

It involves using a third-party open source application called FontForge to convert the TTFs that DfontSplitter gives you from a Mac-specific TTF format into ‘regular’ TTF format.

A full tutorial on using this method is included as a YouTube video screencast below.

If you can’t or don’t want to watch the video, essentially the process is:

• Use DfontSplitter on the .dfont file as normal
• Open the resulting TTF files you want in FontForge
• Export each TTF file from FontForge with File > Generate Fonts. Make sure TrueType format is selected.
• Import the resulting TTF files into Windows fonts folder.

Please do let me know if this process works for you and give any feedback — especially if you’d previously had problems using a .dfont you had wanted to use on Windows.

Yeah, so, I just released some Windows software.

My program for converting and splitting Mac OS X .dfont files into TTF files, DfontSplitter has been a pretty popular route in to my website for some time now.

While the original program is written for OS X, it became apparent from my website statistics that many people who needed to convert .dfont to .ttf were Windows users.

So, today, I have released DfontSplitter for Windows, version 0.1. This program is, again, simply a wrapper script for fondu, which does the real work. It has a completely unique GUI, custom built for the Windows platform.

There is also a brand new project page for DfontSplitter, with links to both the Mac and Windows versions of the software and the documentation too.

Hopefully this can serve the need of Windows users who need to convert those filetypes, and don’t want expensive or spyware-ridden software. Enjoy!

A quick footnote – this is a bit of a licensing quagmire. There are lots of different licenses that apply to different bits of DfontSplitter for Windows, including GPL 3.0, GPL 2.0, BSD and Creative Commons. That’s all explained on the project page, and in further depth in readme and licence files in the downloads.

Oh and it’s also slightly ugly, in terms of how it interacts with fondu. But it works. 🙂