DFONT to CID Converter

Transform DFONT into CID-keyed font format online for free

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CJK Ready

Converting DFONT to CID opens access to efficient CID-keyed glyph organization, handling large character sets needed for East Asian language publishing.

No Install Needed

The entire DFONT to CID conversion runs in your web browser. No font editing tools or command-line utilities to set up on your machine.

Secure File Handling

Uploaded fonts are automatically deleted after conversion, and all output files are purged from our servers within 24 hours.

How to convert DFONT to CID

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

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

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

About formats

DFONT (Data Fork TrueType) is a font file format introduced by Apple with Mac OS X 10.0 in March 2001, created to solve a fundamental compatibility problem in the transition from classic Mac OS to the Unix-based OS X architecture. Classic Mac fonts stored glyph data in the resource fork — a secondary file stream specific to the HFS file system — but OS X's Unix foundation and its use of UFS had no native resource fork support. DFONT relocates the entire resource fork structure into the data fork, wrapping the same TrueType font tables in a resource map that standard OS X typography APIs can read. The file is essentially a resource-fork-less TrueType suitcase. Apple bundled DFONT as the default format for system fonts shipped with OS X, and it remains present in macOS system directories. One advantage is seamless backward compatibility with Apple's existing font rendering stack — the internal structure mirrors classic resource-fork fonts, so CoreText and its predecessors handle DFONTs without any special conversion path. The single-fork design is another practical strength, ensuring that DFONT files survive intact when stored on non-HFS volumes, transferred over networks, or managed by version control systems. While Apple has increasingly moved toward OpenType (.otf/.ttc) for newer system fonts, DFONT files continue to appear in macOS installations and in font collections originating from the OS X era.

Developer: Apple Computer

Initial release: 2001

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Why convert DFONT to CID?

CID-keyed fonts handle massive character sets efficiently — essential for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) typography and professional multilingual publishing workflows.

How do I open a CID file?

CID fonts are used by PostScript-based RIPs, Adobe InDesign, and TeX distributions. FontForge can also open and edit CID-keyed font structures directly.

What makes CID different from standard fonts?

CID organizes glyphs by character ID rather than encoding, allowing a single font to contain thousands of glyphs without encoding limitations.

Will my font glyphs transfer accurately?

Yes. The conversion maps all DFONT glyph outlines into the CID structure faithfully, preserving shapes, widths, and positioning data throughout.

Is the conversion entirely browser-based?

It is. No software downloads or plugins — upload your DFONT file to Convertio, and the CID conversion happens server-side in moments.

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Specific converters

OTF to CID

TTF to CID

BIN to CID

SVG to CID

CFF to CID

DFONT to CID

PFA to CID

PFB to CID

PS to CID

PT3 to CID

SFD to CID

T11 to CID

T42 to CID

WOFF to CID