Font problem - Helvetica Neue

Thanks Kurt,

I did burn a cd with the two helvetical system versions. (the system seemed to find them even in the trash can)

This seems like a viable solution so I'll give it a try. One question, can I keep them in a folder inside my "master font folder" and just import them into my font manager essentially treating them like any other font?

Hi jack@*!,

Part of the issue would be Font Book. Never have more than one font manager on your system at a time. Since you use FontExplorer X, I assume as your day to day manager, then delete Font Book from the applications folder. You have no need for it.

One question, can I keep them in a folder inside my "master font folder" and just import them into my font manager essentially treating them like any other font?

Yup, they're really no different than any other font. It's just that Leopard by default is set up to keep people from easily removing them for the sake of those OS X apps that require the use of those specific fonts.

Thanks again, I think that is the ticket and seems to be working for me so far, we will see as time passes.

Font Explorer now seems to be in control of both versions of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue and all apps seem to be responding appropriately. It is not a perfect setup, but it is 95% of the way there.

Just a side note: There is a preference pane called Diablotin that allows you to manage even the System fonts (except for the two or three MUST BE PRESENT ones). Also, you gotta wonder what a designer is thinking, creating a document choosing a font like Helvetica Neue--an excellent font, but one that probably causes conflicts on his or her own system and confusion around the office if there are collaborators. Of course some of this stuff is forced upon designers and agencies. There are so many thousands of fonts out there that I decided years ago to avoid fonts in documents that have different OS9 (back in the day) or OS X versions floating around unless the style manual from the client demanded it. Oh well, C'est la vie.

"For the average user, there is no need to replace the supplied .dfont versions of Courier or Helvetica. The information in this section is intended for advanced users. If you don't feel you fall into that category, please disregard this section to avoid possibly causing your Mac to become unusable by accidentally removing critical system fonts."

This part loses me. I kind of thought a lot of average Mac users were ones who worked in Quark or InDesign. Mac users that probably have existing documents that use Helvetica (it's actually been the default font for the Normal style in Quark for the last decade).

My department will open these types of things on a daily basis:
Old Quark files (Classic days) that used Helvetica Postscript v1.006
Old Quark or InDesign files that used Helvetica Postscript v2.000
Old Quark or InDesign files that used Truetype Helvetica dfont v5.0
Old Quark or InDesign files that use the Postscript LT version of Helvetica v6.000
These are just our files...
We also will get random new jobs from customers that could also have any of the above variations, along with the new Opentype LT version - which is not yet part of our standard library.
And then, there are the Apple apps that like the dfont version best.
(Helvetica Nueue will have similar issues, but not nearly as widespread.)

From reading this, I'm glad we haven't transitioned to Leopard yet. I'm attempting to release a new font libary to the seven Macs I have to support that will cause the least amount of problems. I don't know how long I can put off the Leopard upgrade.

The Creativetech article ( http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/preparingfor_leopard_helvetica_isdead.html) seems to be mostly on target. I feel that as part of a normal workflow, we should ban "Helvetica" from all jobs we control from this point on. We could change it to "Helvetica LT". This is tedious, and it's not error-free. Really old jobs (for us it's legal books) that use the v1.006 Helvetica flow differently than the newer versions. So, we'd have to carefully switch the font; find all the line break problems and fix them; proofread to check the work. This is even if one only wanted to do a minor correction on page 28.

I would prefer a font manager that just figures it all out, and doesn't blow out the caches while doing it. Fusion is close under 10.4.11. But things go wonky if you load back in the dfont Helvetica (and sometimes you need to).

But I have no clue what to do if a random customer file shows up and uses the conflicting Postscript versions. Use it? Change it? The time-honoured way to work these jobs was to load the customer's fonts, and print it that way. Whatever they are.

I might not be an average user, but aren't there tens of thousands of Mac graphic users that are going to be affected in some way by this?

I think somebody needs to film a sequel to the documentary "Helvetica" once this plays out...

Hi Thomas,

What I really mean by the average user is your typical person with a home computer. A person such as yourself in prepress is in the professional category. Although with most Macs being used by print shops, designers and advertising agencies, the "average" user does describe those rather than the home user.

The time-honoured way to work these jobs was to load the customer's fonts, and print it that way. Whatever they are.

Exactly right, which is why Apple's decision to use Helvetica as a system font was not a good idea at all. Why not use an Apple supplied sans serif font that almost no one uses in design or prepress? Like Arial, Geneva, or even Lucida Grande? All of these look almost identical to Helvetica. Worse, almost all of the internal names for Apple's two supplied Helvetica fonts are identical to the names in Type 1 PostScript versions, which of course makes it impossible to open the client fonts you need until you get the Apple supplied fonts out of the way.

Fortunately, the only Apple supplied app that seems to dislike not having the OS supplied versions of Helvetica around is Mail. Though it will still open if you're using a different form of Helvetica.

You're well aware that there are multiple versions of Helvetica you must use with your documents to avoid text reflow. That's bad enough. But there's also the modified versions your clients send. Far too many for Apple to have use Helvetica as a system font.

Anyway, that's the purpose of section four of my article (it's in draft mode at the moment, so few people have seen the whole updated document). To get Apple's supplied Helvetica fonts completely off the system in Leopard so they're out of your way.

Great tip Kurt - I've always referenced your 'Font Management' post every time I set up a new machine (or OS installation, fwiw) for myself, and I ran into the same problem as everyone else, re: Helvetica Neue.

One question, though - I'm still getting a conflict message about HelveticaNeue even after following your instructions - I copied the font over to FontAgent Pro and it auto-activated once I shuffled through some OSX apps/widgets/etc. Do I just eliminate it completely from my font manager or...?

Work With Pete!

I'm still getting a conflict message about HelveticaNeue even after following your instructions - I copied the font over to FontAgent Pro and it auto-activated once I shuffled through some OSX apps/widgets/etc. Do I just eliminate it completely from my font manager or...?

And there's another Leopard app that needs Helvetica I didn't know about. Also found out that iLife 07 and iWorks 08 require Helvetica Neue.

Where the font is on the hard drive makes no difference. If it's active by any means (FAP in this case), it has the identical effect of being in a Fonts folder. So it will conflict with another Helvetica or Helvetica Neue just the same.

About all you can do is go back into FAP and disable the Apple supplied versions of Helvetica whenever you need to if they keep turning themselves back on.

I see that Insider Software has just released FAP 4. I'm downloading it now to see what's changed.

If you'd like to read the complete draft on my updated article, you can see it here.

What I don't get is there seems to be only one copy of the OSX HelveticaNeue on my machine - managed by FAP - and it's STILL saying there's a conflict.

Only when I put it back in the System Folder (and out of FAP) did I stop getting the conflicts.

Is there a 'phantom' .dfont or something that the system is seeing and thinking there's two versions active when I turn it on in FAP?

Now that's weird. I can't imagine why FAP would be saying there's a conflict if you know there's only one copy of Helvetica Neue. The only thing I can think of is that you chose to let FAP manage the system fonts. It supposedly then moves them to another location on the drive. So the conflict could be between the "special" system font location it creates and the one you have in its normal set lists.

No, FAP was actually not managing the System fonts at the time of the error messages.

Helvetica and HlvNeue were actually in FontAgent Pro because I copied them there, but as I said I was getting the conflict errors so I manually removed them from FAP and put them back into the System folder - presto, no more conflict errors. That's why I was wondering if there isn't another backup location where OSX keeps those fonts for system use.

Another weird occurrence was that the conflict errors seemed to be originating from FontBook - weird because I had actually removed the program from my machine entirely...

Could one possibly do without the .dfont version of Helvetica Neue altogether, and just keep a Postscript version permanently active in FAP?

No, FAP was actually not managing the System fonts at the time of the error messages.

Okay, I was just speculating since I can't see your system.

Helvetica and HlvNeue were actually in FontAgent Pro because I copied them there, but as I said I was getting the conflict errors so I manually removed them from FAP and put them back into the System folder - presto, no more conflict errors. That's why I was wondering if there isn't another backup location where OSX keeps those fonts for system use.

Nope, those are the only two locations. The /System/Library/Fonts/ folder and the ProtectedFonts folder.

Another weird occurrence was that the conflict errors seemed to be originating from FontBook - weird because I had actually removed the program from my machine entirely...

If you actually deleted the Font Book application from the Applications folder on the hard drive, then it's impossible for the conflict to be coming from it. Font Book does however copy every font you activate with it to one of two folders you can choose in its preferences. So while it was on the hard drive, it may have copied some form of Helvetica or Helvetica Neue to either the /Library/Fonts/ folder, or the Fonts folder in your user account at ~/Library/Fonts/. I assume though you've already checked both of these.

Could one possibly do without the .dfont version of Helvetica Neue altogether, and just keep a Postscript version permanently active in FAP?

You can. It's more a matter of which Apple programs you use and how well they manage without the Unicode .dfont versions. If they run okay with the PostScript versions, then go ahead.

That does make me think a bit, though. Did you have at any point both the .dfont versions and the Type 1 PostScript versions of Helvetica and/or Helvetica Neue active at the same time? If so, that will create a font conflict. A font conflict isn't just from identical versions of the same font (i.e. having two .dfont copies active at the same time). It's from any type of font having the same internal names.

That does make me think a bit, though. Did you have at any point both the .dfont versions and the Type 1 PostScript versions of Helvetica and/or Helvetica Neue active at the same time? If so, that will create a font conflict. A font conflict isn't just from identical versions of the same font (i.e. having two .dfont copies active at the same time). It's from any type of font having the same internal names. >>

The only other version HelvNeue I had on my machine at the time of the conflict was the OpenType version, which was inactive. At one point I did add a Postscript version to my FAP library to see if I could activate that in place of the .dfont, but when I imported my Postscript version it seems like the .dfont cannibalized it. I've since wiped out all of the Postscript HelvNeues in FAP.

I'm wondering if I shouldn't 'start over' somehow at this point.

That's kind of what I was starting to think. FAP's database or something is goofed up and reporting conflicts where there aren't any. I'm not sure though how you go about resetting FAP. Anything in the manual or on the developer's site?

Well, tried a few things last night:

1) Wiped out FAP from my machine (app, database, font library, prefs, et al), left Helveticas in System/Library — no conflict error

2) Reinstalled FAP, let it manage system fonts (it only actually manages the fonts in the root library folder, not the ones in the System/Library folder) again, no conflicts

3) Next, I removed Helv and HelvNeue from the system/library folder, installed Postcript Helveticas in FAP, rebooted. When I came back and started Dashboard (my personal test because the weather widget uses two kinds of Helveticas), FAP auto-activated HelvNeue Light and I got the conflict message again. Now, this is with NO Helveticas (save for the MM versions) in the System/Library folder and NO trace of Fontbook anywhere on my machine and I still got a little error box with the FontBook logo telling me that 'HelveticaNeue Light' was conflicting with a system font and that I should deactivate it.

Very strange, and I think I'm ready to just throw in the towel on this one. I do have the Opentype library on my machine, and I guess I'm just going to swap in those every time I have a job that uses Helvetica.

Sigh....

Thanks for attempt at helping me though - I will try this process again one day if I ever do another clean install.