• Opentype To Ttf
• Convert Open Font To Truetype
• Convert Ttf To Fnt

Excuse the long title, but this drove me absolutely bonkers. Part of creating prototypes that are as realistic as possible is ensuring that you have as close to the actual resources as possible. I was building a Figma prototype the other day on a Windows desktop I have at home and it did take more effort than I liked to setup Apple’s UI fonts. Being an ex-Software Engineer I did find a way, and I hope to help other Designers who may not have the know-how.

Step 1: Download the fonts

Sounds easy enough– after a quick Google I quickly found myself on the official source of Apple’s San Francisco fonts for text and display:

Problem is, the .dmg file is not a native format to Windows. Most Designers and Mac people will recognise this as a standard file format containing applications or plugins for applications. Think of it as a fancy .zip or .rar file.

I followed this guide and similar resources, but to no avail:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/71470/how-to-use-san-francisco-font-on-windows

The Online Font Converter is a 100% free service. The Online Font Converter converts fonts to/from: pdf dfont eot otf pfb tfm pfm suit svg ttf pfa bin pt3 ps t42 cff afm ttc woff woff2 ufo Online font converter has a simple API that is simple to use without any cost. File Extension conversion from FNT to TTF is the conversion of computer file extensions from Font File to TrueType Font. Furthermore, each computer program handles file extensions in a different manner. Whenever any one of these variables is changed, data must be converted in some way before it can be used by a different computer, operating system or program. TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Technical details: SVG images and their behaviors are defined in XML text files.

I wanted to install as little single-use software as possible, and had no luck extracting using the 7zip utility (refer back to the featured image at the beginning). After some more digging, I actually found and downloaded the fonts from here in a lovely .zip folder:

End of story right? Extract the folder and install the fonts? Nope! Windows 10 throws a fit at some .otf files.

Step 2: Convert your Fonts to Installable Formats

The easy mode is to use an online converter, but I find that online tools like that don’t make it easy to convert multiple files at a time. This is probably to prevent people overloading their systems with huge requests. If you only have one or two fonts, you can probably use one like this:

Ain’t as much fun though, is it? Let’s do the techie thing and convert them ourselves!

2a. Install the Windows subsystem for Linux on your machine:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-install-bash-shell-command-line-windows-10

If you haven’t used it before and are a bit daunted by using terminals, don’t worry I’ll try to make it as clear as possible :wink:. Plus, it’s the Swiss Army Knife of computers. I hooked up my system with Ubuntu as I thought most guides online would be in that format.

2b. Open up a bash terminal once you’re ready. Windows key + “bash.exe” or within the start menu, find the program “bash.exe”.

I found and used this guide to help me:
http://www.stuermer.ch/blog/convert-otf-to-ttf-font-on-ubuntu.html

So, let’s install the fontforge cli (command line interface) tool:

Opentype To Ttf

Done? Cool. Make sure it’s executable over in bash land.

Step 3: Install the Fonts

All that’s left is to install all the fonts! To make this easier, let’s put all the .ttf files in a folder: