I’m writing this post as a follow-up to the Adobe Captivate Font Rendering post from October because an issue was left unresolved. If the standard font formats are OpenType and TrueType, and even the Adobe Collection of fonts distributed with Adobe programs contains all OpenType fonts, where canyou find the PostScript fonts you need for Captivate projects?

Of course you could purchase them, but that’s not ideal. The price for the PostScript version of one of our client’s fonts is $500 because it’s packaged with the TrueType version (which we already have).

So I searched the Web for an open source converter and found FontForge. To install FontForge on a Windows OS you must also install cygwin. On a Mac you need to install the X11 server. Cygwin and the X11 server will make your machine look enough like a UNIX machine to run the program. This is a fine solution for a developer or technology-savvy person, but I know our Instructional Designers who use Captivate will certainly be intimidated and deterred by the process.

The best solution I found for converting any type of font to a PostScript format is FontLab‘s product TransType Pro, which costs $179. Unfortunately the demo download for TransType does not allow you to test the conversion of a font to PostScript. Although FontLab products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee, if you wish to test a conversion before making a purchase, you may use the demo download for FontLab Studio to convert 20 characters of your font set. You can then test the font in Captivate using only those 20 characters to see if the conversion will meet your standards.

Tags: Captivate, font

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 11:15 am and is filed under Developer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.