Leopard Font Madness

[IJ Reilly]

I am having a maddening problem with fonts which worked fine in every version of the MacOS I have run for well over ten years, but now fail to work correctly in Leopard. I had many fonts which formerly resided in my "Classic" Fonts folder, which Tiger recognized. All of this was migrated from my old Mac running Tiger to my new iMac running Leopard. Some fonts, when dragged from the Classic into the OSX Fonts folder, continue to work as before. Others exhibit strange behaviors. They will display correctly in old documents which already include the font, but they don't show in the Font Pane or the Font Book, so they can't be used in new documents in which the font was not previously included.

I've posted this question in the D&G forum, with the hope that one of the design folks might have a handle on how fonts are managed differently in Leopard -- and perhaps a suggestion for how to fix this problem.

Thanks!

 

[MisterMe]

Do your problematic fonts have anything in common?

 

[IgnatiusTheKing]

I am having a maddening problem with fonts which worked fine in every version of the MacOS I have run for well over ten years, but now fail to work correctly in Leopard. I had many fonts which formerly resided in my "Classic" Fonts folder, which Tiger recognized. All of this was migrated from my old Mac running Tiger to my new iMac running Leopard. Some fonts, when dragged from the Classic into the OSX Fonts folder, continue to work as before. Others exhibit strange behaviors. They will display correctly in old documents which already include the font, but they don't show in the Font Pane or the Font Book, so they can't be used in new documents in which the font was not previously included.

I've posted this question in the D&G forum, with the hope that one of the design folks might have a handle on how fonts are managed differently in Leopard -- and perhaps a suggestion for how to fix this problem.

Thanks!

I wish I could help you, Brother Ignatius, but I've also been having quirky Font Book issues. Luckily, my fonts still appear in my Adobe programs, but do not appear in Font Book.

 

[Moof1904]

Try Linotype FontExplorer X. It's free and it's great.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Do your problematic fonts have anything in common?

Yeah, none of them work.

Actually my problem was with one font family that we just happen to use for all of our text. A real show-stopper.

I wish I could help you, Brother Ignatius, but I've also been having quirky Font Book issues. Luckily, my fonts still appear in my Adobe programs, but do not appear in Font Book.

Do they appear in other applications?

From my random readings, apparently Leopard uses different and stricter rules for how fonts are organized into font suitcases. Unfortunately, OSX provides no method for organizing fonts in suitcases. The only free solution to this problem it seems is using the ancient Font/DA Mover application in Classic, assuming you still have a Mac that can run Classic.

In my case, I was able to locate the source of the original fonts, which came with Adobe Illustrator 9.0 (throw nothing away!). Copying them back into the fonts folder seems to have corrected the problem, was apparently was a corrupted suitcase containing the bitmaps.

Try Linotype FontExplorer X. It's free and it's great.

I will check that out. Thanks!

 

[IgnatiusTheKing]

Do they appear in other applications?

From my random readings, apparently Leopard uses different and stricter rules for how fonts are organized into font suitcases. Unfortunately, OSX provides no method for organizing fonts in suitcases. The only free solution to this problem it seems is using the ancient Font/DA Mover application in Classic, assuming you still have a Mac that can run Classic.

In my case, I was able to locate the source of the original fonts, which came with Adobe Illustrator 9.0 (throw nothing away!). Copying them back into the fonts folder seems to have corrected the problem, was apparently was a corrupted suitcase containing the bitmaps.

They appear in Pages and Keynote; I haven't checked other programs.

 

[ruskiwi]

Have you tried dragging them to Font Book instead of just to the Fonts folder?