Font Management

Hi Juliano --

Are you a designer, perhaps?
I see that you're organizing your fonts by sans serif, serif, etc.
That's how I used to do it, too.

Anyway, which third party font manager did you install?
How many fonts do you have?
I think you might look into undoing your Font Book . . .
Having two font managers is a nightmare, usually.

Good info here, by Kurt Lang:
http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html

Ok, thought I had spotted another Fontaholic, LOL.
So, please do read Kurt's Font article.
It's the best info you'll ever get on fonts.

If you hope to make a living doing design and/or you're going to depend on excellent font management, I cannot recommend Font Book. It's really for the home user. Personally, I really like FontBook Pro, but Kurt prefers others better. It's all in his article.

Do you have a good backup of your fonts?

So I think I'm going to remove all my fonts from my Library leaving the OS required fonts and reinstalling everything from scratch.

Good Plan.
As a professional, just don't rely on FB.

Hi Juliano,

You want to get Font Book off your system. Once its database gets corrupted (and that happens easily, and often), fonts simply stop working as expected. To get Font Book off your hard drive, follow these steps:

1) Open Font Book, and then its preferences. Uncheck the box for "Alert me if system fonts change". Close the preferences and shut down Font Book. Put the Font Book application in the trash and delete it.

2) Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key when you hear the startup chime to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding it until OS X asks you to log in (you will get this screen on a Safe Mode boot even if your Mac is set to automatically log in). Let the Mac finish booting to the desktop and then restart normally.

This will reset Font Book's database and clear the cache files in your user account. Any font sets you have created will be gone. Also, all fonts in the three main Fonts folders (System, Library, your user account) will now be active, regardless of their state beforehand.

The main goal in this step is to remove the orphaned Font Book database from the hard drive. With the Font Book application no longer on the hard drive, a new one cannot be created. Which is what we want.

3) Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command. You can also copy/paste it from here into the Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

This removes all font cache files. Both for the system and all user font cache files. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

At this point, all fonts should be active and working. Now start trying the various font manager replacements you're considering. My personal choice is Suitcase Fusion 3. It takes "the font from Hades" to make it stall or crash. I've only ever had ONE font manage to do that. And that was on a purchased CD of fonts, no less!

I can't say enough good about activating fonts in place, which both Suitcase and FontExplorer X Pro can do. I mention this to lead into Bee's personal favorite, FontAgent Pro. It is also a rock solid piece of software that works very well. But, it has one drawback that can cause a very expensive disaster. Any fonts you activate with FAP (it has no option to activate in place), it copies the fonts to a separate location in your user account and then handles them from there. Now say you have three separate folders of fonts for various projects and each has one font which is identical. You open those fonts as three separate sets in FAP. What FAP then does is copy only the first version of that identical font to its storage folder and uses the same font for all three sets.

This sounds logical and efficient. It's not. You may modify that font, or a client will send you a modified version of that same font, usually without telling you it's been altered. Now if you, or they didn't give the altered font a new name and you add it to FAP, it will NOT be copied to the storage folder or even be used! FAP will activate the font already there by that name. If that gets all the way through to press, and your client doesn't notice until then that the kerning, or whatever they changed is not present in the text, you will be caught with a very expensive bill to reprint the project.

How often would something like this happen? Probably pretty rarely. But if they're printing 25,000 copies of something, the replacement paper cost alone could set you back several thousand dollars. It's just something to be aware of about FAP.

FontExplorer X Pro is reportedly still having some minor issues in Snow Leopard. Namely in the occasional font(s) that just won't activate for whatever reason. Linotype has gotten that issue mostly worked out (used to be a bit more frequent), but it's still showing up now and then. That may be more of a problem with corrupt font caches causing the issue than FEX itself. Auto activation is also still spotty.

I honestly can't find a fault with Suitcase. A really crappy font may hose its database (which it uses whether or not you're activating fonts in place), but is easily fixed by creating a new one from its panel in the System Preferences. Suitcase reportedly has the most reliable auto activation, but I can't vouch for that as I don't trust auto activation, no matter whos software it is. I keep the fonts for each project in a folder within that project and then create a set for it in Suitcase. When I want the fonts for that project on, I turn them on. Then I know I'm using the correct fonts.

If you want to get a full list of all of the required system fonts, please check out the Font Management in Mac OS X Best Practices Guide:

http://www.extensis.com/fmbpg

You can also clear your font caches using Suitcase Fusion 3 or other font cache clearing utilities such as Font Doctor or Font Nuke.

Jim Kidwell
Extensis

Jim --
Very nice of you to pop in.
The lists for required system fonts (4 OSs) and lots of other great info is also in the article
by Kurt Lang that I linked to above.

But your booklet looks great, as well.
🙂

until they decided not to support it anymore so I had to delete it.

Linotype still develops FEX, it's just not free anymore. You'd have to upgrade to the paid version to get a Leopard or Snow Leopard compatible version.

I'll give it Suitcase 3 a try. Hopefully, they have a trial version first.

They do. It will run for 30 days. Make sure to completely uninstall FEX. Which includes going into the System Preferences and removing the startup item for it.

Font Explorer X creates a folder on my home folder with all the fonts installed in my system.

That happens because you told it to. During setup, you get a check box to "Organize Font Files". This is where you determine how you want FontExplorer X Pro to handle your fonts. If you leave the box unchecked, then fonts are always activated in place. Turn the check box on, and it operates in the same manner as FontAgent Pro, by copying or moving the fonts you add to its own storage space in your user account. If you change your mind later how you want FontExplorer X Pro to handle fonts, you can open its preferences and click on the Advanced tab. At the top, you'll find the same options you had during the first use setup.

So you must have checked the box, or changed it later in the options to do that. None of the fonts need to stay there. Only FEX can find and activate them. So copy them off to another drive first if you want to save those fonts. Otherwise, just delete the entire "FontExplorer X" folder.

Jumping in here with another point of view.... I'm a designer and went down the third-part font manager path a few times; I eventually came to the conclusion that they're more trouble than I'm willing to put up with. When I got a new MBP a year ago, I spent a couple of days going through my font collection pulling out the ones I actually use and archiving the ones I use only rarely and separately archiving the ones I maybe-someday-will-use. At the same time, I replaced the TrueType fonts with OpenType versions whenever I could. The fonts that were left I put into Font Book and validated. About a dozen out of 700 had problems; I replaced or got rid of those. I did have a few old InDesign and Illustrator documents that complained about missing fonts, but they were easily repaired and the layouts changed only insignificantly. Moving on, I've had zero font problems since the overhaul and I really don't have any trouble finding or getting to the fonts I want out of the 700 or so that are installed. If I need a font I don't have installed for some project or another (it happens only rarely), I install it, use it, and then remove it, storing a copy of it in the same folder as the document that uses it in case I need to revise that document in the future.

I think a lot of designers get caught up the the mania of font collecting (I've done it myself), but with my more disciplined approach now, I haven't had an issue with fonts in the past year. For me at least, font managers are no longer a part of my work environment. YMMV.