Help with fonts on Mac OS X

Hi everyone,

I'm using a python module that reads system fonts from the /Library/Fonts directory. It only reads .ttf and .otf file formats but it looks like most of my fonts are in the .FFIL (font suitcase) format. My question is if there's any way to extract a .ttf file from this font suitcase? Is there anywhere I can get the corresponding .ttf files? Or a conversion utility of some sort? If you know of anything that could help, I would appreciate it. Otherwise I will just get the .ttf files from my other computer (but I was hoping for something more elegant). Thanks for the help!

Ah, thanks for the help. My macbook has 10.5 on it and it has .ttf files for most of the system fonts - perhaps it is only 10.4 that uses exclusively font suitcases? The reason I am trying to do this is because I am preparing figures for publication (using Python's matplotlib module to create the graphs). The current font (which is probably the only .ttf font I have on this computer) is rather ugly- but perhaps more importantly, since these figures will eventually be published, it is important I use a standard font such as Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, on the graphs to maintain compatibility with the publisher.

To make a long story short (long, because I tried just about everything else), my solution was to send the python script to my macbook pro and generate the figures there. It was a bit of a hassle because I needed to download and install the python modules on my macbook, but it wasn't too bad. I am just surprised that Apple has eschewed the standard .ttf fonts for this new format, as it seems they lose some compatibility in the transfer. I thought there would be an easier solution (I tried 'forcing' the module to read FFIL, but surprise -it didnt work)... but it seems Apple has fixed this with their newer operating system, so there is not much that can be done about it.

Thanks for the help!