Adobe Postscript Type 1 fonts and Windows 7

Question

I have a disk with Adobe Postscript Type 1 fonts ("Adobe Type Basics" that I purchased in 2001). The disk includes an install program that does not work on my current computer (Windows 7, 64). Can I get those fonts installed on my current computer, and if so, how do I do it. Step by step, please. Many thanks.

Answer 1

Although we at Adobe certainly do recommend use of OpenType font technology going forward and especially for new publishing projects for any number of very good reasons, Adobe does continue to fully support Type 1 fonts (FWIW, TrueType and OpenType fonts are every bit as much PostScript fonts as Type 1 or Type 3 fonts are) in all our applications as well as in our Adobe PostScript and Adobe PDF Print Engine products and has committed to do so for the indefinite future.
In fact, Adobe still does license and ship Type 1 fonts in fairly high quantities. Every printer sold with Adobe PostScript 3 by Adobe's OEM partners such as Xerox, Ricoh, Canon, Océ, EFI, etc. is accompanied with host software that includes the Windows and Macintosh host versions of all the Type 1 fonts that are also printer resident.
Actually, the problem that the OP of this thread was experiencing is that apparently, the Adobe Type Basics was built without the .pfm files that normally were shipped with all Adobe type packages for Windows. When ATM was required for installation of those fonts, since ATM had the capability of building .pfm files on-the-fly, this omission wasn't noticed at the time by most users (even I wasn't aware of it until today). Otherwise, there was nothing wrong with those fonts and there was nothing about them that was “showing their age.”
Unfortunately, the Adobe Type Basics OpenType Edition is not a superset of the fonts in the original Adobe Type Basics product. Many of the font families of the original product were replaced by totally different font families. Updating to the OpenType-based product would not have solved the OP's problem without possibly needing to license a whole bunch of additional font families individually, possibly costing more than the $99 for the Adobe Type Basics OpenType Edition itself. For existing content (including templates and artwork), it is not simple to move from Type 1 to OpenType without going through existing content and globally changing all font references. The OpenType versions of Adobe's font do not have the same names as the Type 1 versions - this was not an oversight, but done for good reason since there are differences between the products in encoding and metrics that could in some cases cause layout issues.
          - Dov