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Macintosh OS X System Fonts

Macintosh system fonts such as Geneva, Monaco, Chicago, and Charcoal had traditionally been easy to spot because of their distinctive names. But with the introduction of OS X, Apple threw a monkey wrench into the font wars by including system fonts named Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, and Times Roman, just like their PostScript cousins. Under the hood, these are TrueType fonts, but you’ll see them described as dfonts, a moniker derived from the fact that the fonts are data-only, and not a two-headed file consisting of a data fork and a resource fork. (If this doesn’t mean much to you, don’t worry.)

Macintosh dfonts aren’t inherently evil, but they are problematic because their names are indistinguishable from their PostScript ...