Leopard Font Organization

Question

Level 1

24 points

Leopard Font Organization

I did a standard upgrade when installing Leopard and I noticed some font issues shortly thereafter. I've sorted some of it out already, but my main question is how are fonts organized in Leopard? I'm finding fonts spread about and I'm still have a few duplicate font issues.

I believe 'Library >> Fonts' should be the default, but what about these:

- 'System >> Library >> Fonts'
- 'System >> Library >> Frameworks >> ApplicationServices.Framework ....(gets deeper)... Protected Fonts

I guessing some of these should have been consolidated and/or deleted upon upgrade.

Font Book is indicating some duplicates, but I'm having trouble finding them all. No fonts exist in the user directories and a search comes up empty handed. Also, I have not yet installed any third party fonts which I usually do by creating a unique library. Any suggestions?

MacBook Pro 17" / 2.4Ghz, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 9, 2007 11:33 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Bill Fant1 Author

Level 1

24 points

Nov 9, 2007 12:21 PM in response to Bill Fant1

The hidden duplicate font issue has been remedied by following these instructions:

http://pagesfaq.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-fonts-in-leopard-are-crazy-how-do-i.html

Regarding the above... Upon further investigation, I think Leopard splits the fonts up:

System >> Library >> Fonts (must have system fonts - cannot delete or move)
Library >> Fonts (fonts that come with OS X, but not required)

Not sure about 'Frameworks' folder content and I'm not messing with it. Next time I may do a clean install.

Reply

Answer 2

Bill Fant1 Author

Level 1

24 points

Nov 9, 2007 1:04 PM in response to Bill Fant1

Font Book and/or Leopard font organization seems buggy.

Now I'm adding my own fonts to Font Book and having lots of problems. I ran Font Doctor prior to brining in my collection, so their shouldn't be any corrupt or duplicate fonts. I've also created a new Library within Font Book to keep my set separate.

Font Book keeps crashing as I add my fonts (directories by letter - so I can narrow the conflicts). They are activating as I install even though I've designated NOT to activate within the preferences. The new preferences aren't very intuitive and new fonts activate NO MATTER HOW you set it. I'm guessing some of my fonts conflict with the system, but it's hard to figure out without adding fonts one-by-one. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't auto-activate. Previous versions weren't such a hassle.

Reply

Answer 3

SharonZ

Level 2

490 points

Nov 9, 2007 8:07 PM in response to Bill Fant1

The "auto activation" feature in Font Book prefs has nothing to do with whether the fonts are activated when they're first installed. This new Leopard feature is something that lets Leopard automatically (and temporarily) activate a font if you open a document that uses a font that isn't currently activated. The font doesn't even have to be installed in Font Book and be in a disabled state - Leopard will look thru your entire hard drive for font files and offer to open what you might need for that specific document.

There's no way around the fact that FB automatically enables fonts when you install them. But you can make it easier to turn off all the new ones, depending how you organize your fonts. If you create a collection (not a library) and put all your fonts into that collection as you install them, you can then just turn off the entire collection. Since fonts can belong to more than one collection (a collection is just a sublist of installed fonts, gathered together for group manipulation like this), even if you also want to put them into collections like A and B and C, etc, you can start them in the NewInstalls collection so you can disable them all at once.

Crashing is something else. It's highly unlikely that it's due to conflicts. It's possible that it's due to a bad or old (or bad and old) font here and there, but not conflicts. If you could narrow the issue down a little, we might be able to solve that.

s.

Reply

Answer 4

SharonZ

Level 2

490 points

Nov 9, 2007 8:16 PM in response to Bill Fant1

/System/Library/Fonts does contain fonts that are absolutely necessary, but not all of them are; some can be removed.

You can remove:
-The Hiragino fonts
-AppleGothic
-AppleBraille
-LeHei Pro
-Thonburi
-STHeiti fonts
-Shogakukan

You can also remove some standards like Courier, Times, Zapf Dingbats, etc - but you shouldn't because they're used all over the place and you should have them; they're just not necessary to the system.
So, you need:
AquaKana
Geneva
HelveLTMM, Helvetica LT MM
Helvetica
HelveticaNeue
Keyboard (won't show in Font Book)
LastResort (won't show in Font Book)
Lucida Grande
Monaco
Times LT MM
TimesLTMM

s.

Reply

Answer 5

Bill Fant1 Author

Level 1

24 points

Nov 10, 2007 9:46 AM in response to SharonZ

Thanks Sharon.

Regarding Leopard fonts...

It seems that some duplicates get left over from Tiger with a standard upgrade. I found several duplicates within 'Library >> Fonts' and had to manually delete. The older versions don't contain an extension while the newer fonts do (arial vs. arial.ttf, Comic Sans MF vs. Comic Sans MS.ttf, - 10 or so fonts).

Then, a few more duplicates appeared after opening Safari (Palatino, Optima, Herculanum, Gill Sans & Cochin). I could not locate these in any font folder, but the Terminal trick found in the link above fixed that. I think there is still one other font missing or conflicting somewhere as I've noticed different fonts appearing in some web pages I frequent. The same pages appear differently on another Mac with Leopard.

Regarding my fonts and Font Book crashing...

Even though Font Doctor checked all my fonts, Leopard wasn't happy with a few of them. I ended up adding them to a unique Library a few at a time to narrow down which ones crashed the app. I deleted them from my set and finally completed the set up.

In any event...
- Font organization and activation seems more difficult or touchy in Leopard
- I should have read the Font Book help since functionality (activation) has obviously changed.
- I guess there should be two root level font directories as stated above:

System >> Library >> Fonts (must have system fonts - cannot delete or move some)
Library >> Fonts (fonts that come with OS X, but not required)

Wonder for what reason.

Thanks again. Still think I'll do a clean install next time.

Reply

Answer 6

SharonZ

Level 2

490 points

Nov 10, 2007 2:52 PM in response to Bill Fant1

System >> Library >> Fonts (must have system fonts - cannot delete or move some)
Library >> Fonts (fonts that come with OS X, but not required)
Wonder for what reason.

The /System/Library/Fonts are for the system's use (duh, you knew that).
The /Library/Fonts folder is a place that applications, or "administrators" can put fonts that will be able to be shared by all users of a particular Mac, since the Mac is designed to be a shared machine, with multiple-account capability.

That's why there's also a user's Fonts folder, so that each user of a Mac can have his/her own collection of Fonts that won't clog other users' Fonts menus.

Font Doctor/Leopard not being happy...

I'm always confused by what Font Doctor is supposed to be doing. A year or more ago, a friend's newspaper-publishing office finally moved up to OS X. We had to check and move thousands of fonts. I checked them all with Font Doctor; had to discard some. Then, while installing them thru Suitcase Fusion, which has Font Doctor with it, some of the already "fixed" stuff didn't pass; on the other hand, then some of the stuff that Font Doctor (standalone) said it couldn't fix, but Suitcase let it in after checking it, and they've been fine <sigh>.

Reply

Answer 7

Nov 10, 2007 6:38 PM in response to Bill Fant1

I've created several libraries of fonts, each library containing the fonts acquired from a given source. Currently the libraries are Adobe, Apple, iLife, iWork, and Microsoft, each library containing all of the fonts obtained from the designated source. All of the fonts for a given library are kept in a separate folder. Thus, ignoring the fonts in System/Library/Fonts, there are five font folders.

In addition, the fonts in each of these libraries have been exported via Font Book so that all of the files for a given font family are contained in an appropriately named folder inside of the library folder.

Other than the fonts in System/Library/Fonts, the five aforementioned libraries of fonts are kept in Users/Shared/Fonts. An advantage of having the fonts there instead of Library/Fonts is that, given that Library/Fonts is the default place where applications tend to install there fonts, it is easy to determine which fonts an application has installed.

So far, Font Book has dealt well with this organizational structure. I did make a single pass through the five libraries and resolved duplicates.

The final conclusion is that this organizational structure provides a good method of managing fonts via Font Book.

Reply

Answer 8

Nov 11, 2007 1:24 AM in response to Bill Fant1

Bill Fant1 wrote:
- 'System >> Library >> Frameworks >> ApplicationServices.Framework ....(gets deeper)... Protected Fonts

Do not under any circumstances delete the fonts in the /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/...
/Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ProtectedFonts/ folder!

The ATS.framework is the Apple Type Services framework, which contains the ATSServer (the background process that handles everything to do with fonts: activating, deactivating, caching, etc.). As you can see in the path above, those are meant to be protected fonts; Leopard has a "self-healing" feature that's meant to restore the core fonts back into the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder if necessary. (Prior to Leopard, if you deleted LucidaGrande.dfont from the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder, upon restart your Mac would hang indefinitely on login with a blue screen. There was no easy way to fix this (unless you consider starting up in single-user mode and moving files around using the command line to be easy).

Hope this helps....

Reply

Answer 9

Nov 15, 2007 1:23 PM in response to MarkDouma®

Pro graphics/ repro users might have to remove protected fonts such as helvetica neue because it clashes with the full (expensive) set of postscript versions we have.

dfonts aren't suitable for professional printing and need to be removed so they don't clash

Reply

Answer 10

SharonZ

Level 2

490 points

Nov 15, 2007 5:14 PM in response to Kevin Neal

Kevin Neal wrote:
Pro graphics/ repro users might have to remove protected fonts such as helvetica neue because it clashes with the full (expensive) set of postscript versions we have.

dfonts aren't suitable for professional printing and need to be removed so they don't clash

Both Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are absolute musts for OS X; if they're removed, you'll have all sorts of problems. As long as you have other versions of them available and activated, you'll be fine, but a blanket recommendation to remove these fonts can be problematic if users don't realize how important they are. It's a particular problem for pros because they turn fonts on and off so often, and may remove the system's Helvetica, say, and then turn their version off in Suitcase or whatever management program they're using. Unless a user is very sure of what fonts are where, and will ALWAYS leave certain fonts, like Helvetica and Helvetica Neue on, it's safer to leave the system versions in, add your versions, and turn the right ones on when you need them to avoid "clashes" - which, thank goodness, aren't like font clashes of old - the worst that usually happens is that you wind up using the wrong version of the font, not crashing your whole system.

The same goes for many of the dfonts - not that you'll be doing much designing with Geneva or Monaco!

Reply

Answer 11

Bill Fant1 Author

Level 1

24 points

Nov 16, 2007 7:33 AM in response to Bill Fant1

Can someone post the list of fonts (font file names) that should be installed for Leopard (with clean install) within the following two folders:

- System >> Library >> Fonts
- Library >> Fonts

I did not do a clean install and it seems some fonts from Tiger were combined with the newly installed Leopard fonts (Arial plus Arial.ttf,etc.). This caused Font Book to indicate duplicates and I've since cleaned things up (see above comments). However, it seems things are still off.

A few problems I'm having (and not sure if above will help, but want to give it a try):

- Some websites I frequent are showing incorrect (or secondary choice) fonts.
- Motion cannot find project fonts even though they are available and active in Font Book (Optura & Futura) Project started in Tiger and all the same fonts should be available.

Reply

Answer 12

Nov 16, 2007 7:51 AM in response to Bill Fant1

Bill Fant1 wrote:
Can someone post the list of fonts (font file names) that should be installed for Leopard (with clean install)

Someone may have compiled a list, but Apple has not done that yet. For what it is worth, here is the list of fonts in 10.4: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301332

Reply

Answer 13

Nov 16, 2007 12:19 PM in response to SharonZ

problem with that is the dfont version of helvetica neue will be active and so is going to get used in Quark or Indesign, which is bad news because dfont should be avoided,

Also if you put a full bought set of helvetica neue in your system font folder instead of the dfont, OS X won't recognise it for internal use

Reply

Answer 14

Nov 17, 2007 12:26 PM in response to Bill Fant1

Here are the contents of /Library/Fonts immediately following a clean installation of Leopard. The list is by family. If there are more than a single font face in a family the number is shown in parentheses following the family name.

#GungSeo
#HeadLineA
#PCMyungjo
#PilGi
Al Bayan (2)
American Typewriter
Andale Mono

Apple Chancery
Apple LiGothic
Apple LiSung
Apple Myungjo
Arial (4)
Arial Black
Arial Hebrew (2)

Arial Narrow (4)
Arial Rounded MT Bold
Arial Unicode MS
Ayuthaya
Baghdad
Baskerville
BlauKai

Big Caslon
Brush Script MT
Chalkboard (2)
Charcoal CY
Cochin
Comic Sans MS (2)
Copperplate

Corsiva Hebrew (2)
Courier New (4)
DecoType Naskh
Devanagari MT (2)
Didot
Euphemia UCAS (3)
Futura

GB18030 Bitmap
Geneva CY
Georgia (4)
Gill Sans
Gujarati MT (2)
Curmukhi MT
Hei

Helvetica CY
Herculanum
Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro (2)
Hiragina Kaku Gothic Std
Hiragina Kaku Gothic StdN
Hiragino Maru Gothic Pro
Hiragino Maru Gothic ProN

Hiragino Mincho Pro (2)
Hoefler Text
Impact
InaMathi
Kai
Kailasa
Kokonor

Krungthep
KuftStandardGK
LiSong Pro
Marker Felt
Microsoft Sans Serif
Mshtaken (4)
Nadeem

New Peninim MT (4)
Optima
Osaka (2)
Papyrus
Plantaget Cherokee
Raanana (2)
Sathu

Silom
Skia
StFangsong
STKaiti
STSong
Tahoma (2)
Times New Roman (2)

Trebuchet MS (4)
Verdana (4)
Webdings
Wingdings
Winddings 2
Wingdings 3
Zapfino

Reply

Answer 15

Nov 17, 2007 12:52 PM in response to James_L. Ryan

Here are the fonts installed in /System/Library/Fonts immediately following a clean installation of Leopard.

Apple Braille Outline 6 Dot.ttf
Apple Braille Outline 8 Dot.ttf
Apple Braille Pinpoint 6 Dot.ttf
Apple Braille Pinpoint 8 Dot.ttf
Apple Braille.ttf

Apple Symbols.ttf
AppleGothic.ttf
AquaKanaBold.otf
AquaKanaRegular.otf
Courier.dfont

Geeza Pro Bold.ttf
Geeza Pro.ttf
Geneva.dfont
HelveLTMM
Helvetica LT MM

Helvetica.dfont
HelveticaNeue.dfont
Keyboard.dfont
LastResort.dfont
LucidaGrande.dfont

Monaco.dfont
Symbol.dfont
Thonburi.ttf
ThonburiBold.ttf
Times LT MM

Times.dfont
TimesLTMM
ZapfDingbats.dfont

Seven More Fonts with Oriental Character Names

Reply