CID to CFF Converter

Extract Compact Font Format outlines from CID-keyed fonts online

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Technical Precision

CFF captures the exact PostScript outlines and hinting from your CID font — providing raw glyph data ready for font engineering workflows.

Fast Extraction

Even CID fonts with expansive CJK glyph sets are processed quickly on our servers. Get your CFF output in seconds rather than minutes.

Nothing to Install

The entire CID to CFF extraction happens in the cloud. Access it from any browser without downloading specialized font development tools.

How to convert CID to CFF

Select files from Computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, URL or by dragging it on the page.

Choose cff or any other format you need as a result (more than 200 formats supported)

Let the file convert and you can download your cff file right afterwards

About formats

CID (Character Identifier) is a font architecture developed by Adobe Systems and specified in June 1993 to address the challenges of fonts containing very large glyph sets, particularly for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts. Traditional PostScript fonts identify glyphs by name, which becomes impractical when a font contains tens of thousands of characters — a typical Japanese font may include over 20,000 glyphs. CID-keyed fonts replace glyph names with numeric identifiers organized by a character collection and ordering (such as Adobe-Japan1 or Adobe-GB1), dramatically reducing overhead for glyph access and subsetting. The architecture defines three PostScript font types: Type 9 (CID-keyed Type 1 outlines), Type 10 (CID-keyed Type 3), and Type 11 (CID-keyed Type 42/TrueType). A primary advantage is efficient handling of massive character sets — the numeric CID approach eliminates the memory and processing cost of maintaining thousands of glyph name strings. CID fonts also support sophisticated CMap resources that map encoding values to CIDs, enabling a single font to serve multiple encoding schemes (Unicode, Shift-JIS, Big5) without duplicating glyph data. The architecture integrates well with PDF subsetting, allowing documents to embed only the glyphs actually used. CID-keyed technology laid the foundation for CJK support in both OpenType and modern PDF workflows, and remains active in print production and document processing systems worldwide.

Developer: Adobe Systems

Initial release: June 11, 1993

CFF (Compact Font Format) is a font outline format developed by Adobe Systems around 1996 as a more efficient successor to the Type 1 font representation. CFF uses Type 2 charstrings — an optimized encoding that supports multiple arguments per operator, default value elision, and shared subroutines — to describe the same cubic Bezier glyph outlines as Type 1 but with substantially less storage. A typical CFF font is 20-50% smaller than its Type 1 equivalent. The format can function as a standalone font file or, more commonly, as the outline data table inside an OpenType font container (the CFF table in OTF files with PostScript outlines). CFF supports multiple fonts within a single file through its FontSet structure, sharing global subroutines across the collection to further reduce size. One advantage is compression efficiency without lossy degradation — every control point and hint is preserved exactly, just encoded more compactly. The format also inherits the full hinting capability of Type 1, including stem hints, counter hints, and alignment zones that ensure crisp rendering on low-resolution screens and printers. CFF2, an evolution introduced with OpenType 1.8, adds support for font variations (variable fonts) by allowing interpolation across multiple design axes. Broad support in PDF viewers, web browsers via OpenType, and professional design software makes CFF one of the most widely deployed outline formats in digital typography.

Developer: Adobe Systems

Initial release: 1996

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert CID to CFF?

CFF stores PostScript outlines in a compact binary form. Extracting CFF from CID gives you portable glyph data for font engineering and toolchains.

How do I open a CFF file?

Font development tools like FontForge, AFDKO, and various type design applications can load and inspect CFF outline data directly.

What is the difference between CID and CFF?

CID is an addressing scheme using numeric IDs for large glyph sets. CFF is a compact outline storage format — CID fonts often contain CFF data internally.

Are all glyphs preserved in CFF?

Yes — every glyph outline, hint, and subroutine from your CID font is carried over to the standalone CFF file without data loss.

Is there any charge for this?

None. Convertio processes CID to CFF conversions at no cost. Just upload your font and download the extracted CFF data.

Related Conversions

CID to TTF

CID to JPG

CID to OTF

CID to WOFF

CID to JPEG

CID to GIF

CID to PDB

CID to PNG

CID to SVG

CID to BMP

CID to BIN

CID to AFM

CID to CFF

CID to DFONT

CID to PFA

CID to PFB

CID to PS

CID to PT3

CID to SFD

CID to T11

CID to T42

CID to UFO

CID to JP2

CID to WBMP

CID to TGA

CID to PCX

CID to TIFF

CID to ICO

CID to CUR

CID to PBM

CID to PGM

CID to PPM

CID to WEBP

CID to EXR

CID to FAX

CID to FTS

CID to G3

CID to HDR

CID to HRZ

CID to IPL

CID to MAP

CID to MNG

CID to MTV

CID to OTB

CID to PAL

CID to PALM

CID to PAM

CID to PCD

CID to PCT

CID to PFM

CID to PICON

CID to PICT

CID to PNM

CID to PSD

CID to RAS

CID to RGB

CID to RGBA

CID to RGBO

CID to SGI

CID to SUN

Specific converters

TTF to CFF

OTF to CFF

BIN to CFF

PFB to CFF

SVG to CFF

WOFF to CFF

CID to CFF

DFONT to CFF

PFA to CFF

PS to CFF

PT3 to CFF

SFD to CFF

T11 to CFF

T42 to CFF