> macOS stores fonts in resource forks? I'm confused, what use does this have and what happens when you accidentally miss them?
Classic MacOS considers fonts to be a type of resource, and hence stores them in the resource fork. Contemporary macOS fonts are just ordinary files with a data fork only. I think grandparent is talking about the 1990s, although some of those machines remained in active use through the first few years of this century.
Windows originally considered fonts to be a type of resource too – the original bitmap fonts used with Windows 1.x-3.x are stored as a resource–except unlike MacOS it embeds resources into EXE/DLL file data instead of putting them in a fork. In fact, a .FON file containing a Windows bitmap font is just an EXE with no code, only resources. Nobody really uses this any more, everything is TrueType now and TrueType uses its own file format not resources, but Windows still supports the old bitmap fonts for any legacy apps which still use them.
I originally thought you meant "macOS takes random fonts, stuffs them in resource forks for other non-font files, then bad things happen if the resource forks are ever lost" which makes zero sense to me.
Anyway... so macOS fonts themselves were made of resource forks and therefore trying to transfer fonts themselves across a non-resource-fork-supporting network share will fail? As in, the resource forks were needed in order to use the font file?
Not me. ajcoll5 made the statement, you expressed confusion with it, I tried to explain what (I assume) ajcoll5 meant.
> Anyway... so macOS fonts themselves were made of resource forks and therefore trying to transfer fonts themselves across a non-resource-fork-supporting network share will fail? As in, the resource forks were needed in order to use the font file?
On Classic MacOS, some files, all the actual contents is in the resource fork, and the data fork is ignored and can be empty. So you copy such a file to a filesystem which doesn't support resource forks, you can end up with an empty file.
A good example of this is executables. 68k Mac executables, all the code is stored in the resource fork (as code resources), and the data fork is ignored and can be empty. So you copy a 68k Mac executable to a forkless filesystem, you can end up with an empty file.
By contrast, PPC Classic MacOS executables, the code is in the data fork, and the resource fork only contained actual resources such as icons or strings, not the code. If you lost the resource fork, you'd still have the code of the executable. But it probably won't run without the icons/strings/etc it expected.
This was how Apple's original (1994) implementation of "fat binaries" worked. The data fork contained the PowerPC binary and the resource fork contained the 68K binary. PPC Macs would load and run the PPC code from the data fork, 68K Macs would ignore the data fork and load and run the code from the resource fork. If you only needed PPC support, you could shrink the executable by deleting all the 68K code resources from its resource fork.
The core resources of Classic MacOS were originally stored in a single file, the "System suitcase". Originally, each installed font was a separate resource in the resource fork of that file; its data fork was unused, except to store an easter egg text message. Fonts were distributed as resources in separate suitcase files, and the "Font/DA Mover" copied them from the distribution suitcases into the system suitcase. So yes, a suitcase file used to distribute a classic MacOS font, the actual font data would be in the resource fork, and the data fork could be empty. In System 7.1, Apple introduced a separate folder called "Fonts". In some MacOS versions (not sure when it was introduced, but definitely was there by System 7.0), Finder displays suitcases as if they were folders, even though they are actually resource forks.
Contemporary macOS doesn't really use any of this stuff. It supports resource forks for backward compatibility, but modern applications don't use them. The "Font Book" app can import Classic MacOS fonts (not bitmap ones, but TrueType and Type 1) from the resource fork of a suitcase file. But once imported, the fonts are stored in ordinary files (with a data fork only) on the filesytstem.
Eh, whatever. I originally thought whoever meant. can't edit the comment now.
> On Classic MacOS, some files, all the actual contents is in the resource fork, and the data fork is ignored and can be empty. So you copy such a file to a filesystem which doesn't support resource forks, you can end up with an empty file.
Yeah, that's about what I thought. That makes sense, thank you~
Classic MacOS considers fonts to be a type of resource, and hence stores them in the resource fork. Contemporary macOS fonts are just ordinary files with a data fork only. I think grandparent is talking about the 1990s, although some of those machines remained in active use through the first few years of this century.
Windows originally considered fonts to be a type of resource too – the original bitmap fonts used with Windows 1.x-3.x are stored as a resource–except unlike MacOS it embeds resources into EXE/DLL file data instead of putting them in a fork. In fact, a .FON file containing a Windows bitmap font is just an EXE with no code, only resources. Nobody really uses this any more, everything is TrueType now and TrueType uses its own file format not resources, but Windows still supports the old bitmap fonts for any legacy apps which still use them.