Paul Lynch spoke thus at 16:17:38 on Thu, 13 Dec 2001:

} On Thursday, December 13, 2001, at 02:36  pm, John Ward wrote:
}
} > We have lots of fonts on our black machines.
} > Does anyone know how I might get them into OSX or into MacOS9

} Here's the problem:
}
} NeXT fonts are Postscript Type 1, in pfa format.[...]

} Legacy MacOS wants fonts in pfb format.  No problem, as there are free
} tools like pfa2pfb and t1utilities that can do this.  But they also want
} the entire font in the resource fork, in what is known as the font
} suitcase format.

ah, right, that explains a lot (eg. like why Unix command-line tools report
the fonts as 0-sized and why you can't even run strings on them).  This whole
HFS metadata crap is a bloody nuisance.  Did people hear about the hoo-hah
caused by Apple suggesting to developers that they avoid using HFS meta-data
(such as resource forks) amongst other things?  Story about it here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/23113.html

} This is what the not-free legacy MacOS utilities can convert for you.

[magical wisdom deleted]

} This should then work on Mac OS X.

} It has taken me since the launch of Mac OS X to put this information
} together, with the aim of writing a simple conversion script.  If you
} manage to make use of it, I'd appreciate a copy :-).

As Pete said, that's all jolly useful stuff, thanks Paul!  Will let you know
how we get on as/when we get a chance to try it all out.  I couldn't find
anything about this on the web or usenet (via google at least): am surprised
no-one's put up a web page about it yet.

        charles