Convert or extract TTC font to TTF - how to?

Question

I am already more than 8 hours trying to make the STHeiti Medium.ttc.zip font work on Windows.

But I can't make it work. Is anybody able to make it work on Windows?

If yes, please share the steps how to do it.

Solution 1

Assuming that Windows doesn't really know how to deal with TTC files (which I honestly find strange), you can "split" the combined fonts in an easy way if you use fontforge.

The steps are:

1. Download the file.
2. Unzip it (e.g., unzip "STHeiti Medium.ttc.zip").
3. Load Fontforge.
4. Open it with Fontforge (e.g., File > Open).
5. Fontforge will tell you that there are two fonts "packed" in this particular TTC file (at least as of 2014-01-29) and ask you to choose one.
6. After the font is loaded (it may take a while, as this font is very large), you can ask Fontforge to generate the TTF file via the menu File > Generate Fonts....

Repeat the steps of loading 4--6 for the other font and you will have your TTFs readily usable for you.

Note that I emphasized generating instead of saving above: saving the font will create a file in Fontforge's specific SFD format, which is probably useless to you, unless you want to develop fonts with Fontforge.

If you want to have a more programmatic/automatic way of manipulating fonts, then you might be interested in my answer to a similar (but not exactly the same) question.

Addenda

Further comments: One reason why some people may be interested in performing the splitting mentioned above (or using a font converter after all) is to convert the fonts to web formats (like WOFF). That's great, but be careful to see if the license of the fonts that you are splitting/converting allows such wide redistribution.

Of course, for Free ("as in Freedom") fonts, you don't need to worry (and one of the most prominent licenses of such fonts is the OFL).

Solution 2

You can use onlinefontconverter.com site. It works fine and have plenty of output formats (afm bin cff dfont eot pfa pfb pfm ps pt3 suit svg t42 tfm ttc ttf woff). One of the advantages I saw, is that it export all the fonts contained inside the ttc at once (which is very convenient).

Solution 3

This is what worked for me for extracting TTFs from .dfont and .ttc files from Mac OS X: http://transfonter.org/ttc-unpack

The resulting TTFs work fine in Windows 7.

Solution 4

If you've got a Mac the easiest way to split those would be to use DfontSplitter, available at https://peter.upfold.org.uk/projects/dfontsplitter

The Windows version they provide doesn't work with ttc files.

Solution 5

http://transfonter.org/ will do the job for you. Just upload your .ttc and it will give you a folder with all the fonttypes in .ttf files.

View more solutions

Comments

[gerlos]

I got a similar problem in Ubuntu: couldn't use the "GillSans.ttc" font in LibreOffice. Solved thanks to your tip: just opened it in fontforge and generated each ttf files. I then put generated .ttf files in ~/.fonts and regenerated caches. Now can use that font in Libreoffice.

[rbrito]

@gerlos, if you have not done so already, feel free to upvote my answer if it helped you. This way, I feel encouraged to write more detailed answers.

[lepe]

Good answer (upvoted). However in my case Fontforge crashed (not your fault) while generating the ttf. I posted another alternative.

[A.com]

can you provide more information on generating a font? I opened my ttc and hit generate font but it isn't really doing anything. There are also a ton of options which I am not sure I need to work with? Can you provide some more details?

[Gemini Keith]

It complains the type of font now.

[Gemini Keith]

It has the maximum limit for input font file.

[David Faure]

Right click / install said the font file was invalid, so I have doubts. At least, if it works for you in some cases, it doesn't work in all cases. [Windows 10 here]

[nyconing]

onlinefontconverter.com isnt working but this can, thanks.