Adobe announced in a Help document published January 27, 2021 that they would discontinue support in their software for PostScript Type 1 fonts for authoring (including creating new content or editing existing content) in January 2023. (Adobe Photoshop will end support for Type 1 fonts in 2021, as announced in 2019.)
Type 1 fonts were introduced by Adobe for use with its PostScript page description language in 1984, and it was widely used in the early days of desktop publishing. Beginning in 1996, Adobe products and type development was switched to the much more versatile OpenType format, co-developed with Microsoft.
While Type 1 fonts are still supported by some operating systems, they aren’t supported on the web or with mobile OSs. They lack support for Unicode information. OpenType fonts support many more characters than Type 1 fonts, they support extended language character sets, and they have a standard file format between operating systems.
Adobe’s “end of support” does not affect PostScript (including EPS) or PDF content with embedded Type 1 fonts. It will continue to be placed in InDesign, Illustrator, and FrameMaker documents and such documents will be able to be properly displayed, printed, or exported to PDF.
In addition, Acrobat and other Document Cloud applications will continue to display and work with Type 1 fonts.
Users of documents with Type 1 fonts will need to replace their fonts with OpenType versions of the same fonts before the deadline. You should begin to see warnings in applications like InDesign if you are using any Type 1 fonts in documents that you are editing.
For more details about upgrade paths and other information, refer to the Help document linked above.
This article was last modified on September 29, 2022
This article was first published on February 1, 2021
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