Postscript fonts and OSX 10.6 not working ..?

Being honest - Im afraid im desperate and need simple clear laymans advice on fonts.

I still seem to have fonts missing, some weights in a family etc.

I seem to have masses of duplicates too.

Do i need to pile all fonts into one folder...system or user library fonts?

The following files can no longer be found but contain fonts used by one of your defined font libraries.

Andrew Beswick Design wrote:

"any advice...

plus

*i get a message when i open font book saying*

The following files can no longer be found but contain fonts used by one of your defined font libraries. Font Book will not be able to display information on these fonts until they are restored to their original locations.

then it lists about 30 fonts.... alarmingly!!!!"

I had the same issue in Snow Leopard. I did everything Kurt suggested and that part was fine, but that window kept coming up when I launch Font Book. I even threw it away, did the Terminal delete, safe boot and etc, and it still came up. Finally I realized what Kurt is talking about- in the Font Book window in the upper left is a "collection" list. It might start with "All fonts", then "English", "User" and "Computer". Then there will be custom lists that were user created. This is where the window comes from. I had done a migration from Tiger. Turns out I had one custom list for a special project, and knowing almost nothing about font management, put them somewhere where I didn't know where they were. On the new Snow Leopard system they are nowhere to be found. That's probably because whatever volume they were on, they are not here now. I didn't need that special project on this drive any longer, so I deleted the list in that window. That was the end of the alert.

But interestingly, the alert continued to come up, along with the custom list, even though Font Book was thrown out and erased, and the whole routine done. I had backup up the drive beforehand, and reinstalled Font Book from the backup afterward. Seems to me the list might have been imbedded in the program itself, because I successfully erased the whole thing in Terminal, or so I think:

"

Removing: /private/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee++++ME+++42/-Caches-/System

Removing: /private/var/folders/cp/cp3qE6eI2RWubE+kNPVPc++++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.FontRegi stry"

Anyway, that one alert is about collection lists where fonts are no longer found. You probably have them somewhere, so might go on a search and see if you can find them again, and put them back into the collection.

Thank you Kurt for your great advice and PDF primer. I'm going to get to your PayPal account shortly and send some goodwill.

Carl

Thank you, stedystate. Very generous of you. 🙂

Kurt, a followup to our adventure here. I don't hang out in the font section so much, as once this issue is done we'll move on. I run a small business and we don't change font libraries. Once we're good to go we leave it as-is. So perhaps I can make a small contribution in return and leave this with you for those who can benefit- We're finally making the transition from Tiger/Classic/Clarisworks to Intel/SnowLeopard/Rosetta. The last detail we needed to nail down is that pesky monospaced generic font issue printing out of Appleworks under Rosetta in Snow Leopard. We have a large number of documents we use continually that are formatted in ClarisWorks and open just fine under Appleworks (6.2.4, for particular reasons)/Rosetta.

We were getting the fonts we use appearing fine on-screen, but they were not getting to the printer. I finally read somewhere else (perhaps another forum altogether) that an Appleworks user finally figured out that Appleworks looks in a particular place for its fonts when printing, kind of like a leftover from Classic or OS9. When I put an original font in my user file under Font Book, Appleworks prints generic monospaced font, in this particular case it is Zapf Chancery, ala Apple 1992. But it renders on the screen just fine! What really had me confused is Microsoft Word prints the font without any issue, so I figured its not the font per-se, but Appleworks/Rosetta. Apparently that is the case. Prior to the solution, we could only get an accurate print by using Preview, which worked okay, but that's a different kind of file. I'll mention here I've read folks telling people they need to dump all their legacy fonts and buy new ones. Well that might be a solution, but in our case it was unnecessary.

I manually put the font in the SYSTEM... Home>System>Library>Fonts

“Bingo, problem solved”. And folks that have been using legacy fonts for all these years may not have to throw them all out. I was getting ready to buy an updated version of Zapf Chancery (because Apple Chancery is not the same) and as a last ditch effort tried this manual placement into the System. So now anything I need to print from Appleworks is going there!

I breathe with a sigh of relief. We're not ready to reformat our entire 15 years of document development just yet.

Thanks again for your contributions. I'm going to keep your Font Management paper filed where I can get to it, as well as look for updates from time to time.

Carl

I've never had to do that for any program, so had to think about it for a bit. But it actually does make sense. Programs are indeed written at times to look for files in one place, and one place only. Such as this:

I have found that if you remove the profile "sRGB Profile.icc" from the /System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/ folder, the File Info dialogue box in Illustrator CS4 will come up blank! So will the entire Adobe Extension Manager CS4 interface. What this one particular profile could possibly have to do with the display of a dialogue box, I don't know. You also can't move that profile to the /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/ folder, or the Profiles folder in your user account. While the profile is just as active in either location, the CS4 applications mentioned will blank out if that profile is not specifically in the System's Profiles folder.

So the same idea could be what you ran across with ClarisWorks and Appleworks. In OS 9 and earlier, all fonts were in the /System Folder/Fonts/ folder. So the closest these programs could come to find a font in its expected location of the system folder is /System/Library/Fonts/.

That is such a great catch that I'm going to add that to my article as a possible fix for such issues.

Thank YOU, Carl! 🙂