Convert font suitcases (resource forks) in modern macOS

conver font suicases.txt

First extract the suitcases to regular files with dataforks
-----------------------------------------------------------------
(Source: http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/macosx.html)
(Source: http://fondu.sourceforge.net/)
(Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7412462/using-os-9-resource-fork-fonts-in-css-with-font-face/64561713#64561713)

This is a very old file format where the font information is only contained in the resource fork, not the data fork, so the files seem empty to most modern apps.

First we can group them all in a single directory taking advantage of the find command, because find doesn't see the resource fork and consider the file empty, we create a new directory in the user home and copy all the suitcases there:

    mkdir ~/rsrc
    find . -type f -empty -exec cp {} ~/rsrc/ \;

Then in mac we can use [brew][1] to install Fondu

    brew install fondu

Finally we move to the directory with all the suitcases and run fondu on each file like this, the secret to get fondu to work is to make it read the resource fork by adding /../namedfork/rsrc at the end of the file, otherwise it fails.

    cd ~/rsrc
    find . -type f -empty -exec fondu -force {}/..namedfork/rsrc \;

When the command finishes you should have a folder with the new .ttf, .bdf and .pfb files.

You can delete the suitcase files from this directory running:

    find . -type f -empty -delete

To deal with the resulting .pfb files
-----------------------------------------------------------------
(Source: https://jeromejaglale.com/doc/convert_pfb_pfm_font_to_otf)

install fontforge with brew

create pfb2otf
#!/usr/local/bin/fontforge
Open($1);
Reencode("unicode");
Generate($fontname+".otf");
Quit(0);

create convert
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
FONTFORGE_LANGUAGE=ff
export PATH FONTFORGE_LANGUAGE
if (test -f $1); then ./pfb2otf $1; fi

make them executable:

chmod +x pfb2otf convert

place them in the same folder as your PFB and PFM font files

launch the conversion

for i in *.[pP][fF][bB]; do ./convert $i; done


  [1]: https://brew.sh/