OTF to CID Converter

Convert OpenType fonts to CID-keyed format online for large character sets

Drop files here. 1 GB maximum file size or Sign Up
to
Facebook Amazon Microsoft Tesla Nestle Walmart L'Oreal

CJK Optimized

CID-keyed format from your OTF font enables efficient handling of thousands of CJK glyphs in PostScript printing and typesetting environments.

Swift Conversion

Even OTF fonts with extensive glyph sets convert to CID format quickly on our servers — no long waits for complex character collections.

Private and Secure

Your OTF font files are deleted right after conversion and output CID files are removed within 24 hours to protect your typographic work.

How to convert OTF to CID

1

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

2

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

3

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

About formats

OTF (OpenType Font) is a scalable font format jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe, announced in 1996 and later standardized as ISO/IEC 14496-22. OpenType unifies TrueType and PostScript font technologies under a single container — OTF files with PostScript outlines use CFF/CFF2 tables for cubic Bezier curves, while those with TrueType outlines use quadratic splines in glyf tables (these typically carry the .ttf extension despite being OpenType). The format supports up to 65,535 glyphs per font, enabling comprehensive coverage of Unicode's vast character repertoire including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK, and mathematical symbols within one file. Advanced typographic features are encoded in GSUB (glyph substitution) and GPOS (glyph positioning) tables, powering contextual alternates, ligatures, small caps, stylistic sets, and complex script shaping. A defining advantage is cross-platform consistency — the same OTF file renders identically on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android without platform-specific builds. The rich OpenType Layout feature system is another major strength, giving designers fine-grained typographic control that was previously impossible in a single font file. OpenType 1.8 introduced variable font technology, allowing continuous interpolation across weight, width, slant, and custom design axes within a single compact file. Universal support in web browsers, design applications, office suites, and operating systems makes OTF the dominant professional font format in modern digital typography.
Initial release: 1996
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 OTF to CID?

CID-keyed fonts are optimized for large character sets — especially CJK scripts. Converting OTF to CID enables efficient handling in PostScript-based print systems.

How do I open a CID font?

CID fonts are used by PostScript interpreters, prepress RIP systems, and specialized typesetting tools that handle CJK and large multilingual character sets.

What is the advantage of CID over regular fonts?

CID uses numeric indexing instead of encoding-based access, allowing efficient management of thousands of glyphs — crucial for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text.

Does conversion preserve all glyphs?

Yes — the full OTF glyph set transfers to the CID format. The CID structure is specifically designed to accommodate extensive character collections.

Is OTF to CID free?

Yes — Convertio offers free OTF to CID conversion online. Just upload, convert, and download with no software installation required.

OTF to CID Quality Rating

4.3 (10 votes)
You need to convert and download at least 1 file to provide feedback!