Pages says I'm missing Helvetica, yet it sure exists

I'm having the same problem, except, it's substituting Helvetica-Narrow. I already posted a question on this...does anybody know the answer?

You could try validating fonts using Font Book & deleting the folder /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS and restart.

I suspect you can safely ignore this error message. Your Mac probably picked up blank paragraphs or even portions of text in your document. I use four languages on one of my computers (English, French, Welsh and Russian), four on the second (English, French, Russian and German) and six on the third (English, Russian, French, German, Welsh and Japanese).

When I move files from one to another Mac remembers last language used and transfers it to new files even though I switch to the current document language. (Command+Space to rotate between the last two languages used or Command OptionSpace to rotate between all language options you are using). So, when I review the document or convert it to PDF the blank paragraphs with languages not used in the paragraph are picked up and fonts are labelled as missing.

If you don't use any foreign languages it could also have something to do with your downloads - I know that a lot of people use Russian sites to download music and films. These downloads can bring Cyrillic fonts that would be listed as missing by your Mac. I believe it's not really a Pages specific problem, but a general OS issue.

Hope this helps.

Sashura
<edited by host>

I too am having the same problem, Pages says it is subbing Helvetica Narrow for the missing font Helvetica. This problem only showed up when I upgraded to Leopard.

Had the same issue here - "Helvetica" and "N Helvetica Narrow" were reported as missing.

I remember during the Leo install a warning coming up like 'Helvetica is used by the system, do you want to install it on a risk basis anyhow' and then I checked No.

I searched with TimeMachine :)) , found and installed them. Bingo! This time I checked Yes.

Thanks to this GREAT discussion forum!

I too have the same problem in Pages since upgrading to Leopard. It says 'Helvetica' is missing and substitutes 'Helvetica-Compressed'. This is serious since every Pages document in my office contains Helvetica and nothing prints correctly.

I checked the Fonts palette in Pages and Helvetica is not listed under All Fonts. I've opened Font Book and Helvetica is not there either. This happens on all five machines in my office that we installed Leopard onto. We did an upgrade install on all machines (2 MacBook Pros and 3 iMacs).

Please help!!!

I've had the same problems on two computers I upgraded to Leopard from Tiger, with iWork 08 installed, but not on a bran new installation.

It seems that somehow, the Leopard upgrade deinstalls the Helvetica font, but the file is still there. All I had to do to fix this on my systems was to search Helvetica in Spotlight, click on the file found, which pops up Font Book, and then click on the "Install Font" button. Then the font was found by pages (and other iWork applications). No more problems.

Jacques

For some reason installing Leopard has caused this on my Mac.
The font is still there.
You just need to make sure the font is available to use for the User Account.
Open Font Book located in Applications (or wherever you may have moved it to).
Click on the Computer symbol on the left and check to see if it is listed. It should be.
Click on the User Account symbol (a silhouette) on the left.
You probably will see that Helvetica is not listed there.
Click on the plus symbol at the bottom of the font column to add the font to the User Account.
Locate the Helvetica font by navigating to: Main disk>System>Library>Fonts>Helvetica
Click that font.
Click the Open button at the bottom right of the dialogue window.
The font should then be added to the User Account.
Open a document that you knew was causing the error to appear and it should all work fine.

Thanks for your post Foliomoda. I had this same problem with Pages not finding Helvetica. I did see the font in Fontbook under computer and all font but never showed up in USER. However when I followed your procedure here to add Helvetica, I got a message that there was a CONFLICT with a system font. I went ahead and ACCEPTED the conflict instead of moving it to the trash. I hope this will not create a problem. Pages now opens fine, as well as Keynote.

This worked for me - however, I had one more dialog box that pops up telling me there could be a conflict with the system installed Helvetica. The default is to move the new font to trash. I selected "Allow Conflict" - and only then did it work. It's not a fix, just a work-around.

Thank you so much. That worked like a champ. It was killing me to have that intermittent problem in iWeb. All is well now.

A common solution to this problem in Mac OS 10.4 was to delete the font cache, as Peggy proposes.

Deleting the font cache in Mac OS 10.5 is less trivial. If anyone dares following the instructions on this blog, I am interested in hearing if it solves any problems.

I'm of course also interested if it causes other problems. I have tried it on my own Mac and it worked, but there may be hidden traps I am not aware of.

Tried this but it did not work. Problem is similar to original post, for more see this post http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1207302&tstart=0

Sorry to be dense if I missed it, but has anyone found the solution here? As people may have surmised by now, this error appears with some regularity immediately upon upgrading to Leopard It appears not to be related to a font duplication per se; that is, even upon removing all extant dupes with Font Book, the error still appears. (For me the replacement is Helvetica Narrow, not the less common cyrillic variant noted in the thread header.)

In addition to the errors in iWork '08, the bug also causes some fonts not to appear as intended in Safari 3, on sites such as MacFixit.com (observe how headlines look, then compare with the same page in Firefox). Worse, it can make text entry difficult in applications such as Yahoo! Messenger and Photoshop CS2, since the OS doesn't know where to place the insertion point.

Mac OS X 10.5.1's release notes apparently make note of fixes to "text drawing corruption," so perhaps a solution is imminent, but it'd be great to solve it before then if anyone knows how.... 🙂

My experience is the same as Mr. Dunham, on the other thread, so please check for System 9 fonts:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1207302&tstart=0

I too upgraded to Leopard from Tiger, under which I had been using 'Classic Mode' to run old applications, and after upgrading Pages refused to find normal Helvetica. The old applications needed System 9 fonts, so there were lots of them stored on my hard disc. I tried 'archive and re-installing' Leopard, but the problem remained. Only after I had removed ALL the System 9 fonts did the problem disappear, and the system and Pages '08 now find the correct Helvetica. The last font I found was 'Sans Serif', yet this still prevented correct operation. Once thrown into the trash and emptied out (and a re-boot) everything operated flawlessly -- thank God!

It seems that any font in a font folder, which is itself enclosed within an old System 9 'System Folder' gets picked up and installed by Leopard at start-up, even if you haven't installed it yourself, and even if the folder is buried many folders deep. The last ones I found on my hard disc were hidden in a folder containing back-ups of old Zip discs that I had made years ago, that in turn were made to back up the whole of a System 9 hard disc. For some reason Spotlight did not find the Helvetica font file, so I had to search for another font by name, before Spotlight finally found the offending folder of fonts (I suggest searching for 'Sans Serif').

Good luck!.