[Here's a short one to give you a taste of typical listserv messages. This is a combination of two posts I sent to the QuarkXPresslistserv in January, in reply to two different posts that each had questions about new font formats.]

Subscriber Posts:

"What is a .dfont? What exactly are the *Pro* fonts?"

My Reply:

.dfonts are True Type fonts with all their data in the data fork (no resource fork info). They only work as is on Macs running OS X. If you use them in a doc on OS X and then convert that doc to PDF, the .dfonts become embedded True Type fonts indistinguishable from other TT fonts. Thus the PDF can be opened/printed on any platform/OS with Reader or Acrobat.

You can convert .dfonts to TT fonts if you like with DFontifier:
<http://homepage.mac.com/mdouma46/dfont/dfont.html>

and I think CrossFont (Windows):
<http://www.asy.com/scrcf.htm>

(note: I haven't tried either one), also there's a short series of commands you can run in Terminal to make a TT copy of a .dfont loaded on your system.

Re "Pro" fonts … They are Open Type fonts that contain glyphs for small caps, figures, etc. There are other OpenType Fonts called "Standard" that are simply the usual Type 1 fonts converted to Open Type format…no cool extra glyphs.