Apple creating never-ending font issues

Can you specify what specific problems you are having? There have been many discussions regarding font issues in Big Sur and Monterey. I haven't working in Graphic Design since...well, never mind...so I'm not familiar with the current state of 3rd party tools. But as far as I can tell, that current state of 3rd party tools is just atrocious.

Font Book is a great example. It's pretty basic. It doesn't do much. But Font Book is just a basic user interface for a larger set of low-level font APIs in the operating system. The biggest problems that I've seen have been 3rd party tools simply aren't using that API. Consider a pretty basic feature like identifying one's favourite fonts. Font Book can do that, and has for years. But 3rd party tools don't support Font Book's font collections. That alone would solve all problems that I've seen.

Another problem are the hundreds of "Noto" fonts that seem to drive people to apoplectic fury. But it turns out that these are document support fonts that 3rd party tools aren't supposed to show in the first place. I got tired of arguing with people about it and just wrote a little app to fix it.

But the key part of all this is that I was able to find out what the problem was, demonstrate who was a fault, and write a demo app that showed how it should be done. That took 9 minutes. Publishing a a full-fledged app to fix the problem took a few hours - a few more minutes to fix the problem, setting up web sites, buying SSL certificates, setting up an App Store page, waiting for Apple App Review, etc.

But you have to ask yourself, or maybe, ask those 3rd party vendors, why some random person on the internet can definitely fix this problem (in their apps) in a few minutes, while they leave their users struggling for years.

FinImp902 wrote:

I had high hopes for FontBook initially. But –as of a year ago– Apple was still advising to use a 3rd party font management tool when working in a professional environment with a large number of fonts activating/deactivating throughout the day.

Apple does make consumer products. The publishing industry got a lot of attention from Apple back when they were about the only people buying Apple products. That isn't the case anymore.

I agree that Font Book isn't a very sophisticated tool. One thing I noticed is that it doesn't subscribe to Font system updates. I guess it assumes that it is going to be the only app ever making changes to the font system. However, the underlying type APIs that Apple provides are powerful and easy-to-use. There is no reason that 3rd party font management tools couldn't provide even better integration and solve all of these problems.

If you make progress with your project, you'll solve a lot of headaches for many in the industry.

Finding out who's actually at fault is key to working through the problem, I agree.

As far as I'm concerned, the project is done. See Barney-15E post for a link. Because I wrote the tool, the Apple Support Communities Use Agreement forbids me to post a link to it myself.

I make no claims about being any kind of font expert. I did do some desktop publishing work back in the 1990s before I was about to get a software engineering job. Identifying and fixing the problem literally took a few minutes. The entire process of building of publishing an app is more involved and that bumped the entire time up to a couple of hours. I have zero intention of expanding this app into a true font management tool.

But I have no idea what is going on the industry these days. This was drop-dead, fall-off-a-log easy - literally one of the easiest projects I've done in years. So you really need to ask some hard questions about why so many people have had so many problems with this for years.

Please keep in mind that we here are merely volunteers who try to help each other with technical issues. You certainly make some strong points regarding those font issues which directly impact your work. I suggest that you should clearly state the issues you have dealt with and then submit them directly to Apple for consideration. They won't respond, but you will be heard. Thank you for speaking up.

www.apple.com/feedback

I've been encountering more font issues... I've been encountering more font issues... And making fonts like Helvetica protected within the system and not easily removed/replaced compounds the problem.

Two times you tell us you have problems, and once tell us that protecting Helvetica adds to the problems... but you never say what the problems are..

You seem to have missed the point of what etresoft said. Not only did he make progress, he wrote an app to fix the third-party software problem that they won’t seem to bother to fix for you. You pay them an exorbitant fee to use their software that fails you to the point you need to rant about it.

Etresoft didn't do anything sneaky or use some undisclosed API. He used what Apple published and expected your expensive software to implement.

I'm seriously thinking about making a free version of Font Menu Cleaner but naming it "Font/DA Mover". It will take some work to get the user interface to look just like it did back in the day. Apparently, that's the only Apple font API that Adobe and the publishing industry supports. Might as well give them what they want. For the "DA" portion, I could have it load and unload launchd tasks for people who really want to scramble their system.

This topic comes up pretty often, see this page for some more info:

http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html