Why use Zip files?

…What to do when your fonts show up as 0kb

A Fork in the file

We’ve come a long way in the printing industry— the introduction of the computer changed everything. It added quality— and complexity in some areas. One of these areas is fonts.

Macintosh systems support two file forks: the Data fork and Resource fork. Windows systems (and the FTP protocol) only support one: the Data fork. Many software engineers in the Graphic Design and Printing industries decided that a font was a resource, and put the information about what a font looks like in the resource fork. The data fork contained other information, such as the foundry name, font author, production date, et cetera.

Journey through the internet

The people putting together FTP, however, concentrated on getting files from place to place, not on how font files were put together. When you send your project through FTP to Spartan Graphics, the files it contains are sent through a number of computers, some of which don’t know about the resource fork. All that makes it through is the data fork, and its bits of meta information.

Zip to the rescue

You can work around this problem (and make your uploads faster) by compressing your files. The Zip algorithm knows about both forks, and packs and unpacks them both safely.