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I currently have a PowerPC g5 running Mac OSx. I've network shared one of the external hard drives (which is mac formatted, hfs+ journalled i believe).

I'm now upgrading this to an ubuntu computer, and I want to ditch that external hard drive and use the ubuntu server's hard drive (ext4).

My question: Can I store Mac fonts on ext4? When I zip and copy the fonts to a windows pc on the network, they all come up as 0kb. Is there anyway to fix this? If not, will these fonts still work on a networked MAC pc? so if I have another mac on the network will it be able to read the ubuntu file system and pick up those font files?

Let me know if you'd like me to explain further, sorry I am new to all this.

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We need to separate how you are accessing the files from how they are stored.

If you are using CIFS or NFS to share an ext4 folder on a Linux machine, then you should be able to access the fonts over the network just fine although you may or may not see performance issues depending on your network setup.

If you want the Mac to read the disk directly (i.e. not over the network) then you will need something like MacFuse ( http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ ) to read the ext4 format.

Actually placing the files on ext4 should not be a problem, and in theory you shouldn't be having this issue when you place the fonts on a Windows box (I suspect something went wrong with your zipping or unzipping).

Further questions arise as to whether you just want to share these fonts among various OSes or whether you want the Mac to treat them as fonts in a standard (user, system) location. However, the above should be enough to get you started.

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  • Well actually the 0kb problem is very common. It's because Mac has a resource link and a data link for every file, where as windows and linux only have the data link. mac fonts are stored entirely in the resource link, and this is always ignored on a windows system because it can't read it. so it just truncates it to 0kb. see: experts-exchange.com/Apple/Operating_Systems/OS_X/… (scroll way down to the bottom of the page for the answer) Thanks for the link to macfuse btw!
    – Jason
    Nov 5, 2010 at 1:10
  • I wasn't aware that OS X was still using resource forks for fonts. These days most OS X files use the resource fork if available, but use other methods to fill in as much meta info as possible. Thanks for the info! Nov 5, 2010 at 3:11
  • Only Type1 fonts, suitcases, and dfont style TrueType fonts store don't information in the resource fork. OpenType and Windows TrueType fonts use the data fork for everything, and are greatly favored over the older style fonts. Unfortunately, upgrading an entire legacy dfont library is expensive.
    – afrazier
    Dec 16, 2010 at 23:49

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