I had this great idea, based on my own intense frustration as a Macintosh user. I love fonts. Nay, I am addicted to fonts. And yet most of the cool, beautiful, desirable fonts available as freeware and shareware are only available for PCs. The font foundries are pretty good about making theirs available in both .zip and .hqx format, but then they don't give away very many fonts. The ultra funky, cutting edge new designers aren't using Macs, I guess, because they rarely have their stuff in .hqx format. Which brings me down, man! So I thought I'd make a page, a font archive, just for Macs. I wanted to list every single font maker and foundry which offers a Mac version as a special service to people like me.
In pursuing this altruistic and worthy goal, I spent around 30 hours this week checking every single source I could find. There's some great font archives around, too, but only one is vaguely Mac-oriented (The Font Fairy, which I find invaluable and which is listed in my links page). Anyway, I got to the point of tears in my eyes when I hit five great original font creator pages in a row with no Mac version. Yeah, okay, so I'm frustrated to the point of tears a lot when it comes to computer stuff. I'm temperamental, and anyway, it's really annoying to discover your entire user group is just out of luck.
"One more," I thought, "I'll just look at one more page, and then I'll go play Solitaire." And I found it. A font archive, Red Sun, who thoughtfully provided a link to a piece of software that converts TrueType fonts to Mac versions! I shrieked with happiness. I'd looked all over Yahoo for such a thing and hadn't found it. I quickly downloaded Chris Reed's TTConverter, grabbed a font I'd been drooling over, and converted it. It worked! I spent the next hour downloading and converting fonts. I'm so happy now.
It doesn't work on every font, sadly, but it works on at least 3/4ths of them, which is good enough for me. And I'm going to do my font archive page anyway, because what the hell, it's a good service. I'm going to do a big honkin' product placement section for TTconverter, you bet. I don't know why font makers don't tell you about it, in fact. It would mean more people using their fonts, and paying for the shareware. I'm getting ready to fork over $30 to various font people, now that I can use their stuff. And I want to apologize to the universe about when I complained earlier this year that $5 fonts were too expensive. $5 per font is a very good deal. Go buy some, and help the artists make more art for us to use.
Then go visit Fontbrain. It's not the awesome and all-encompassing resource I envisioned, but everything listed offers Macintosh versions. You're welcome.