Why do you want to rename them?

I’ve renamed plenty of my fonts to reflect foundries/designers before, so that I can have (for example) different Helveticas on my system at the same time, and so that “Adobe Garamond” is under “Garamond” where it belongs, not alphabetized with the “A”s. I also converted some of my old postscript fonts to Opentype with Fontlab and named them so that I would know they were my conversions, should enhanced OT versions become available in the future from the vendor. I also have an aesthetic disagreement with vendors putting a trademark symbol in the font name.

But Fontlab/Fontographer are certainly overkill for that task alone — I’m curious what suggestions people have, as well.

I’m sure someone will tell me that I sound like a broken record, but in many instances you are probably going against the EULA which applies to the font software you licensed.

Not with mine:

“You may also modify the Font for your own personal or internal business use, but you may not distribute, or transfer your adaptations...”

I don’t know how I sleep at night sometimes.

Try TTF_edit - a freeware TrueType editing tool.

http://www.truetex.com/ttf_edit.htm

Allan Murray

If your font is Open Type you can also use ttx which comes with AFDKO: first apply ttx on your ttf or otf font, then replace all occurrences of the font name by the new name in the resulting ttx textfile and finally apply ttx on it. On a unix system (a Mac for instance), you can avoid hand editing the ttx file thanks to the Unix sed command. You can then do everything with a three line unix script.

Michel

Converting a font also voids and support or assistance you might receive from a foundry in the event of a problem. As someone who troubleshoots font issues regularly, I would have to say that “converted” fonts often cause a disproportionate amount of problems. Font naming is just one issue. As mentioned in other threads, FontLab’s “green gem” auto-naming icon is not sufficient to ensure fonts will work in all applications or across operating systems. A converted font is just like a piece of software that has not been tested. It might work, but the probability of failure is higher. That’s why, for example, you can have confidence in Adobe’s fonts—the same files I’m using have been tested by hundreds of thousands of users. In the case of small vendors like Mr. Shinn, there may be relatively fewer customers. However the foundry takes personal responsibility for making the product function correctly.

A lot of fonts that people think are “corrupt” or “damaged” didn’t damage themselves...

I don’t know how I sleep at night sometimes.

Yes, we know who you are.

One thing to watch for with “conversion”— if you keep the old font files installed, there may be conflicts.
An example of what can go wrong:
http://www.typophile.com/node/36529

Thanx for all your comments. I really appreciate all the feedback.

Concerning font renaming, here is a message taken from a publicly accessible list, dated Oct 1, 2007 (four days ago):

I’m trying to change the Computer Modern fonts [...] from having lowercase names to having uppercase names since all the PDF’s I have refer to the uppercase (resulting in font not found errors in Illustrator or whatever). To this end, I wrote a [...] script to convert the names, but... this script apparently does more then just convert the
names to uppercase - it seems to corrupt a few glyphs.

The font editor was not FontLab and the bug has been corrected since then but this reminds us that we should always keep a copy of the original font on a stable support (CD Rom, DVD) to make sure we can restore it when needed.

Michel