Postscript Fonts in El Capitan outside home/user dir.

[honeycombz]

Hey, I keep my font on a separate drive outside of home/user directory. Always have. I use FontExplorer X to manage them. Always have. Never had any problems really. Recently upgraded from Mavericks to El Capitan only to find out that certain applications aren't dealing with any postscript fonts outside of the home/user directory. Adobe CC has it's own font technology, so this isn't a problem but other applications like Quark or Adobe CS6 and earlier, etc. do. FontExplorer 5 introduced a checkbox that will copy all the afflicted fonts to the home/user directory which I don't really want to do. I'd rather migrate my entire font library to home/user but that's not ideally for me. Extensis suitcase has a similar problem so it's more to do with how El Capitan deals with the fonts than a specific font management tool. Wondering if there might be any workarounds to deal with this so I don't have to move my entire font library?

 

[organicCPU]

FontExplorer X Pro 5.0 for Mac OS X is not Mac OS X 10.11 ready. Version 5.0.1 states that it is. There is also new Version 6.0 out. Version 5.5.x are existing, too. Maybe you should demo Version 6.

 

[honeycombz]

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention I am on 5.5.1. Maybe I should demo 6 but I think this is more of an El Capitan issue but perhaps 6 deals with it differently.

 

[organicCPU]

Did you clear the font caches? Besides the OS X way and FontExplorers cache cleaner I have good experience with FontNuke, that is wiping out some further locations.

 

[honeycombz]

http://help.fontexplorerx.com/client/mac/pro/5/en/pgs/Troubleshooting.html

 

[organicCPU]

OMG, I thought it's an individual problem you have! It's a bug in the OS, officially known as a security feature. Some guys are discussing the topic at an extensis forum, too.
I guess the best thing is to follow the way that FontExplorer offers and to let it copy the fonts to your user folder.

As soon as I'm on a newer OS, I'll try to test if symlinks are working for my PS T1 fonts, so that I'm able to organize them by hand at an external place in two folders. Of course this strategy wouldn't take any advantage of the font manager. Another idea is to lower the security settings. But if that's a good one I can't tell. Maybe there is a .plist file somewhere, that you can tell what folders you consider as a save location.
Sorry I can't really help.
Edit: I don't recommend it, but I would try to temporarily "csrutil disable" the System Integrity Protection just to check if the problem goes away then.

 

[honeycombz]

Hmmm... the symlink idea is intriguing.

 

[honeycombz]

FontExplorer X 6 doesn't deal with this differently. I'm wondering if this is something that will ever get resolved or if my best bet would be to attempt a move of my entire font library to the users/home directory.

 

[organicCPU]

As it seems to be a question of the security mechanism of the operating system, introduced with El Capitan, I don't think Apple will make a step backwards in that. The interesting question for advanced users is, if there is or will be some tweaking possible to fine-tune the security or if the desktop MacOS will move towards iOS, where one needs to jailbreak the OS to make it configureable. I guess for now, the home folder is the best bet to deal with that issue (or take the bitter pill to upgrade all affected fonts and documents to the latest OTF versions).

 

[honeycombz]

With that said, anyone know of a simple way to move the entire FontExplorer X Library to a new location without totally screwing everything up?

 

[honeycombz]

Ok, I just figured out how to do it... move the fonts, scan for conflicts of fonts missing in finder, replace path. Everything works fine now. Bummed I have to eat up another gig on the main drive for fonts but whatever. Apple changed stuff. I also can't organize apple applications in directories of my choosing anymore but that's a different gripe.

 

[organicCPU]

Nice to hear that everything is finally working fine! What you mentioned about organizing preinstalled Apple applications is a consequence of Apple's System Integrity Protection (SIP), too. Meanwhile I've found an interesting article covering the whole topic in-depth on Der Flounder.