Need help recovering a very old Mac font from Resource Fork / AppleDouble files
Hi everyone,
I'm hoping someone here has experience with really old Mac font formats.
First of all: I'm not a font expert by any means. I'm just someone trying to preserve a small piece of design history, so please excuse me if I misuse any terminology.
I've been searching for a particular early-2000s font for quite a while. Recently I managed to contact one of the original designers, who surprisingly still had a copy and was kind enough to send it to me.
Unfortunately, I can't actually use it.
The ZIP contains something like this (the filenames below are placeholders because I'd rather not reveal the actual font name yet):
\[FontName\]/
\[FontName\]Hig (0 bytes)
\[FontName\]Out (0 bytes)
\[FontName\]-High.bmap (0 bytes)
\[FontName\]-Outline.bmap (0 bytes)
\_\_MACOSX/\[FontName\]/
.\_\[FontName\]Hig
.\_\[FontName\]Out
.\_\[FontName\]-High.bmap
.\_\[FontName\]-Outline.bmap
The files inside the "\_\_MACOSX" folder are not empty (around 28 KB / 39 KB), while every file in the actual font folder is 0 bytes.
Looking at the files in a hex editor, the ".\_" files appear to be AppleDouble files containing what looks like a Resource Fork.
FontForge refuses to open either "\[FontName\]Hig" or "\[FontName\]Out" ("unknown format"), which makes sense since they're empty.
The original designer told me that she used to simply drop the font folder into the font manager on both Mac and PC, so I don't think she intentionally sent incomplete files. My guess is that these files came from an old Mac archive and only the Resource Fork survived while the Data Fork was lost during copying or archiving.
So my questions are:
\- Is there any way to reconstruct a usable font from AppleDouble/Resource Fork data alone?
\- Does anyone recognize filenames like "\[FontName\]Hig", "\[FontName\]Out" or ".bmap"? Could they belong to Fontographer, FontLab, Suitcase, or another classic Mac font workflow?
\- Are there any free tools that can extract or rebuild old Mac Type 1 fonts from this kind of data as an OTF or TTF file?
\- Or am I simply missing another file that should have accompanied these?
I've been researching this font for a long time and this is getting super important for me, so I'd really love to exhaust every possible option before asking the original designer to search through old backups again. 😅
Any ideas, old tools, or even educated guesses would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks a lot!
EDIT: If anyone knows exactly what to do and ideally even has the right software and hardware ready to generate an OTF or TTF file for me, I would be very interested in your help. In this case, you can also contact me via pm.