.PFB

Introduction

Type 1 is Adobe’s font format for PostScript, introduced in the mid-1980s and the standard for professional typesetting until OpenType replaced it. A Type 1 font describes each glyph with cubic Bézier curves and hints, written as a small PostScript program. Adobe published the specification in 1990. Adobe’s own applications stopped supporting Type 1 fonts in 2023.

On Windows a font came as a .pfb file with the outlines and a .pfm file with the metrics. The .pfa extension is the same font in all-ASCII form, and .afm is Adobe’s text format for metrics.

Structure

A Type 1 font is a PostScript program in two parts. The clear text part starts with a line such as %!PS-AdobeFont-1.0 and defines the font name, the encoding and other font information. The private part, which holds the hints and the glyph outlines as charstrings, is encrypted with the simple eexec cipher; in a PFA file it is written in hexadecimal, and in a PFB file as binary. A PFB file wraps the parts in segments, each starting with the byte 80, a type (1 for ASCII, 2 for binary, 3 for the end of the file) and a 4-byte little-endian length.

Also used for

• Portable Float Map .pfm

Links