Font Management Oddity

An interesting and informative site, but I didn't find anything there that related to the oddity I am experiencing.

After some experimentation it appears, at least to me, that the following is happening with the iWork '09 applications, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers:

Each of the iWork applications remembers the six most recent fonts accessed, apparently remembering their locations on the drive. This explains why they are accessible even when the containing library is deleted from Font Book but not from the drive. If the font itself is deleted from the drive it no longer is accessible from the iWork applications and any text in that font will then be displayed with strange glyphs from some other font which I haven't identified.

Kurt Lang stated...

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Font Book's default operation and preferences copy every font you activate to the either the /Library/Fonts/ folder, or the Fonts folder in the active user account. That is the one that is then used. So deleted the font(s) from the Shared folder doesn't remove the one Font Book is working with.
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As of this moment Font Book shows that I have 0 fonts in "User", 22 fonts in "Computer", 92 fonts in the library "01-Snow Leopard", and 20 fonts in the library "02-iLife". The "Library/Fonts" folder for my active account is empty. The "Cowboy/Library/Fonts" folder, where "Cowboy" is the name of the currently booted drive, is empty. The "Cowboy/System/Library/Fonts" folder contains 40 items. This suggests to me that the currently active fonts other than the system fonts, are not copied from where they reside within the "Cowboy/Users/Shared" folder.

Kurt Lang wrote:

This suggests to me that the currently active fonts other than the system fonts, are not copied from where they reside within the "Cowboy/Users/Shared" folder.

Sounds that way. As I noted, that was the way Font Book behaves by default. So I assume then that when you add your fonts, you use a Library set, rather then the normal set? Doing it that way adds the fonts "in place", without copying them anywhere.

My usual procedure when new fonts are added to the system is to export them via Font Book and then place the exported fonts into the appropriate library within "Cowbooy/Users/Shared". An interesting, and to me "pleasant", aside is that such an export via Font Book places all the member files of a font family within an appropriately named folder.This makes copying or deleting a family much easier.

Kurt Lang wrote:
Take a look in the the /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/iWork/ folder. Are any of these the fonts that remain active all the time?

It seems that the mystery thickens!

Just now I deleted the file named above in Kurt Lang's quoted posting. I then deleted all of my font libraries which left only the system fonts available in Font Book. I then restarted the computer and in turn opened the three iWork applications, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers in that order. Each of these applications in the font selector in their toolbar listed far more than just the system fonts, and random selections from the list worked even though the selections were of other than system fonts. And adding to the mystery is that the aforementioned deleted file had not been replaced.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Just now I deleted the file named above in Kurt Lang's quoted posting.

I'm confused. You said "file", singular. There should have been a whole bunch of fonts in that folder location. Did you remove all of them?

I deleted the folder /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/iWork. As I mentioned in my prior posting this folder was not recreated with subsequent openings of Pages, Keynote, or Numbers.

I then deleted all of my font libraries which left only the system fonts available in Font Book.

Removing the library listings in Font Book doesn't remove the fonts themselves. If they're still in any of the standard Fonts folders, they'll still show up in your applications.

Please copy/paste what fonts you have in the following folders here.

/System/Library/Fonts/

A screenshot showing what fonts are in the file "/System/Library/Fonts/" is in the like named
folder within the "Font Problem" folder within the Public folder of my taliesinsoft iDisk. Here there should only be those "system fonts" installed by Snow Leopard.

/Library/Fonts/

As above but in "/Library/Fonts/". There are no fonts in this location.

~/Library/Fonts/ (the Fonts folder in the currently active user account)

As above but in "Adventures/Library/Fonts/". "Adventures" is the user account under discussion. There are no fonts in this location.

I do want to say that I fully appreciate your taking the time to work through this oddity with me!

A couple of things...

To access my iDisk you need to access the following location using the menubar in Fiinder

"Go>iDisk>Other User's Public Folder"

and then enter my username "taliesinsoft". There you will find the folder I previously mentioned.

Also, I thought it would be helpful if I wrote a brief description detailing just how my fonts are organized. I'll have that posted within the next day or two.