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PFB (Printer Font Binary) is the binary-encoded version of Adobe's PostScript Type 1 font format — the technology that, along with the Apple LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker, created the desktop publishing industry in 1985. Before Type 1, printers used bitmap fonts that looked jagged at any size the designer hadn't anticipated. Type 1 fonts used mathematical curves (cubic Béziers) that rendered crisply at any resolution.
A PFB file contains the font's outline data: glyph shapes described as PostScript programs, hint data for low-resolution rendering, and encoding vectors that map character codes to glyph names. PFB files are paired with PFM (Printer Font Metrics) files on Windows or AFM (Adobe Font Metrics) files on other platforms — the outline file draws the glyphs, the metrics file tells the layout engine how wide they are and how to kern them.
Type 1 fonts were officially deprecated by Adobe in January 2023, and most modern software has dropped support. Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign no longer render them. If you have PFB files you still need, convert them to OTF using FontForge — the outlines translate cleanly since OpenType's CFF flavour is a direct descendant of Type 1.