I got an Indesign package from a client with a curious file in the fonts folder that had the extension .dfont. When I opened the INDD file, I got a missing font notice for that face. Whereas the OT fonts went right into my Windows font folder, the dfonts were thrown out faster than Rush Limbaugh getting ejected from an Earth Day celebration.After scaring my dog with an outburst of invective about Macs, I went to Google to find out what a dfont is. Long story short: it's a tricked-up TrueType font put into a kind of file called a data fork. This I found after two or three clicks on the Google return for the query "dfont Mac." Regular computers can't use these fonts.
Next, I Googled "convert dfont to windows font," which yielded a lot of commercial font-conversion software. I recently gave all of the money I had to Adobe, with none left for any more commercial software. I clicked through a number of these returns until I came upon DfontSplitter, an open source application that converts Mac dfonts into normal TrueType fonts.
I downloaded the application, installed it, converted the offending font, re-opened the INDD file, and found no warning for that particular face. Of course, there were a lot of other issues, but nothing a few clicks around Google couldn't resolve.
WARNING
Just as Rush Limbaugh and the security guards at the Earth Day celebration might not see eye-to-eye about how things should be, so too with a converted font on a different operating system. Your best bet here is to make a PDF of the output for your client to examine to be certain that the font is behaving properly.
