bristlybadger wrote:
A possible downside to this is that it may affect design software that uses a wider range of Helvetica fonts than those found on the OSX install disc. If such a situation arises, it seems that the only choice at present is to stop using iWork and revert to Office...
Not at all...
I need to use Helvetica Neue PostScript for lots of graphic work, so the HelveticaNeue.dfont always got into my way and I turned it off long ago. Most apps which rely on it can deal with it, they either use the PostScript version or Helvetica.dfont or LucidaGrande.
For those apps/documents which don't, there's usually the option to change it the "hard way":
For example regarding Dashboard Widgets: you can open the widget package and modify the *.css file with TextEdit. Search e.g. for "Helevetica Neue" and replace it with "Helvetica". That's it. Just leave a copy of the unmodified *.css file inside the package, rename it e.g. to "Weather~.css".
In case of iWork documents the problem is that the offending font names are stored in the templates and replacing a font in the Warnings dialog doesn't replace the font in
unused instances of a document. Those are e.g. preformatted tables which you can insert into a document but you didn't yet.
The best approach to fix it for good is actually the same as above, it's just slightly more complicated:
1. Close the document and open its package (if you don't know
how to open a package you shouldn't be messing with these types of things anyway...)
2. Double-click index.xml.gz to decompress it.
3. Open index.xml in your favorite text editor (TextEdit is OK, TextWrangler is better, a dedicated XML editor would be the best since you'll have a better view at the document structure and you might learn something about it for future use)
4. Search for e.g. "HelveticaNeue" and replace all occurrences with "Helvetica" (usually Helvetica.dfont should do almost anything that HelveticaNeue.dfont does and you won't even notice...)
5. Save the file.
6. Now comes the most difficult part: we need to compress index.xml back to the *.gz format. The best way is to use the Terminal.app.
7. In the Terminal window type "gzip " (without the quotes!) and drag&drop the saved index.xml file into the window to get its path. Press Return.
8. Terminal will ask you: "/Users/your
name/your_folder/yourfile.numbers/index.xml.gz already exists; do you wish to overwrite (y or n)? "
9. Press "y" and Return.
10. Close the package window and open the modified document.
11. No more HelveticaNeue warning for this very document.
12. You can apply it for your custom templates, too.
13. In theory, this method should also work for templates in /Applications/iWork '08/Numbers.app/Contents/Resources/Templates/, but it doesn't. I have yet to find out why.
Hopefully, Apple will come up with a fix for this bug...
This is not necessarily a "bug". I prefer to call it a "design flaw"... 😉
Still, it's already better than in the previous iWork version where you were only
informed about missing fonts without a chance to actually +do something+ about it.