Q: Font problems after 10.6.7

Font Book says it's present, Fontexplorer says not.

The gist of the problem is right there. You should never have more than one font manager on your computer at a time. Assuming FEX is the one you prefer to use, you need to completely remove Font Book.

To remove Font Book from the 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. Not that what happens to Font Book's sets matter. We're removing it.

The main goal for the Safe Mode startup 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.

You will definitely have these problems. Here are the problems I have had so far:

1. Saved TT data file is corrupted and both os x and Windows ask for non-existent password and won't open the file.

2. "Printing" tax returns to PDF results in PDFs that hang on both platforms.

3. I can no longer access my wireless router with Airport.

I've been dickin' around for hours trying to find a solution/workaround. I've tried validating fonts--nope. The so-called 'solution' right now, days after the problem was reported, is to reinstall the previous version of the os. Uh-huh! Brilliant!

No one even mentioned the incredibly simple workaround that I did finally come up with. Just print to a PS file, open it in ghostscript (http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html ) and print away. No font problems. No hang. My my. And no one thought of this? One problem I did have, printing it in Windows, is that it kept printing multiple copies. I had to kill the print spooler to get it to stop. Maybe I inadvertently incremented the 'copies' drop-down out of my utter angry frustration. Thanks guys for "making it easier" at tax time. BTW converting the PS to PDF still hangs Acrobat. Don't do it. Print it out directly.

I've found something that works for me with Word documents:

1) Save in Word as a postscript

2) Open the ps file with TeXShop (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html) to convert it to a PDF

3) Open and print from +Adobe Acrobat Reader+ (I'm using version 10.0.2) instead of Preview

It seems that this enables the pdf to open and print fine, even on Windows machines, but when I do the above and open in Preview it looks fine but prints with some of the fonts changed, which is what happened if I had just saved it directly as a PDF from Word.

By the way, my problem seems to be compounded by the fact that I am using Computer Modern fonts I got online (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cm-unicode/files/) since I don't like Times New Roman . I believe that before the update, I could make PDF's just fine saving them as such directly from Word and they would open and print fine no matter what I used (Preview or Acrobat). When I once needed to save a file with these fonts as a PS file, I noticed that Preview would not convert it to a PDF (this was about a month ago), and found the tip to use TeXShop to convert from PS to PDF with Computer Modern fonts (http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020119101251236) which I incorporated above.

Hope this works for others.

Using InDesign CS5, and after updating to 10.6.7, I noticed when scrolling a page that my fonts were messed up...distorted vertically. At first, I wondered if it was in my InDesign preferences, but given it worked fine before the upgrade I ruled that out...also my graphics card. So, I Googled it... found lots of problems with Myraid Pro. Many having issue with Flash and Acrobat PDF's. My solution with InDesign document style was to switch to Helvetica Neue from Myraid Pro and the problem went away. For me, a document-wide font switch does not have any major impact, but for some it may well be a biggie. What I can tell from Adobe forum (http://forums.adobe.com/message/3578679) it's apparently related to the latest OS update and how it renders certain fonts. But that's beyond my pay grade.

You know, ae-editor
--
There are actually two Myriad Pros --
The one that comes with Macs, and the Myriad Pro that is purchased from Adobe.
That's the problem. They are conflicting with each other, if you have both.
I only have the Apple version, so I have no problems with MP and PDFs or anything else, really.

Question for Kurt --
What would happen if everyone who had the Adobe version got rid of the Apple version?
Would it work then???

standard_taper wrote:
2) Open the ps file with TeXShop (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html) to convert it to a PDF

If memory serves, TeXShop uses ps2pdf for .ps to .pdf conversions, and ps2pdf is not part of a vanilla OS X installation. TeXShop typically lives on top of MacTeX (or one of the alternatives) which does include ps2pdf. TeXShop could hardly serve its main purpose without a TeX engine. I doubt it would perform .ps to .pdf conversions either. Installing full MacTeX may be overkill for some users. One could just get ps2pdf (with any dependencies) via MacPorts or something like it and enjoy the same results that standard_taper describes.

Topics like the one this thread is devoted to are precisely the reason why I wait ten days before applying 10.x.y -> 10.x.y+1 updates (and several months for 10.x -> 10.x+1).

I find the absence of any reaction to this two weeks down the line from either Apple or Adobe deeply disturbing.

I've experience this problem first hand. It seems to be spreading. It's definitely not an Adobe issue as nothing with Adobe changed. It is definitely something new that was introduced through Apple. I hope Apple really needs to address this without blaming Adobe for the problem.

Hi ~Bee,

Apple doesn't supply a version of Myriad. They are all from Adobe.

When you install any of the Adobe CS apps, they'll install all kinds of OpenType PostScript fonts into the /Library/Fonts/ folder. Of which Myriad Pro is one.

The Myriad fonts the CS apps install is actually pretty small. I'd have to look on the Design Suite disk again, but I think it's about eight typefaces. The full set of Myriad Pro is 40 typefaces.

I was getting strange font behaviour in Freehand after the upgrade - in the fonts mentioned (Myriad bold etc) however after clearing out the font Cache with FONT SMASHER they are now behaving as before. How long this will last of course is anyone's guess.

I called AppleCare again to see if any action was taking place on this issue. This time the tech was interested in knowing more, so I went through the whole story all over again, and pointed them to both this forum string and the Adobe tech note.

He was able to see the issue in Acrobat on 10.6.7 and not in 10.6.6, so that was reassuring.

The tech assured me that he would send this info up the ladder, and assumed it was already being worked on. Told me to watch for an updater sometime in the near future. Let's hope that he is right, and this issue is being taken seriously.

Still the same problem here. Some of my clients PCs crashed after I sent them a PDF file. This can be reproduced. 10.6.6 doesn't have the problem.

PDfs generated in 10.6.7 crash Acrobat on Windows and subsequtnly the system. I even got asked whether I sent out a virus in my pdf... no fun, when your client's trust is at stake here...

Kurt Lang wrote:
The Myriad fonts the CS apps install is actually pretty small. I'd have to look on the Design Suite disk again, but I think it's about eight typefaces. The full set of Myriad Pro is 40 typefaces.

Wikipedia says the full Myriad Pro family includes 40 fonts: 4 widths with 5 weights each, plus an italics version of each of them. It also says the Regular & Bold weights plus their italics (4 fonts) were bundled with Adobe Reader 7.0 and 8.x, so it is safe to assume at least those 4 are installed on lots of Macs.

On my own Macs, there were 8 Myriad Pro OT fonts installed. I never bought any of the high end Adobe CS apps, but I think these 8 all came with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 or 6, which I own. Yesterday, I received & installed Photoshop Elements 9 & I now have ten Myriad Pro OT fonts, 5 of which show yesterdays modification date. I also have a set of 5 "Myriad Web Pro" OT fonts that were not there before.

I'm not sure what this means, other than there are probably lots of different combinations of Myriad Pro OT fonts installed on different Macs plus some variants of Myriad Web Pro OT, Myriad Truetype, & Myriad Type 1 fonts on some of them as well. It would be interesting to know if there is any correlation between the number of fonts in this (or any other OT) font family installed & the post-update problems with them.

Wikipedia says the full Myriad Pro family includes 40 fonts...

Yes, as I noted.

It also says the Regular & Bold weights plus their italics (4 fonts) were bundled with Adobe Reader 7.0 and 8.x, so it is safe to assume at least those 4 are installed on lots of Macs.

That is true, but they're buried in the Acrobat Reader's application package. So as far as the OS is concerned, they're not available for the user. You can copy them out if into a Fonts folder if you want, and then you will be able to use those fonts. There's a few Multiple Master fonts hidden in there, but if you copy the OpenType fonts out, you'll have these to use:

AdobePiStd.otf
CourierStd-Bold.otf
CourierStd-BoldOblique.otf
CourierStd-Oblique.otf
CourierStd.otf
MinionPro-Bold.otf
MinionPro-BoldIt.otf
MinionPro-It.otf
MinionPro-Regular.otf
MyriadPro-Bold.otf
MyriadPro-BoldIt.otf
MyriadPro-It.otf
MyriadPro-Regular.otf

I never bought any of the high end Adobe CS apps, but I think these 8 all came with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 or 6, which I own.

Not surprising. I didn't mention Elements because I've never owned it, so had no idea what fonts it installed, if any.

I'm not sure what this means, other than there are probably lots of different combinations of Myriad Pro OT fonts installed on different Macs plus some variants of Myriad Web Pro OT, Myriad Truetype, & Myriad Type 1 fonts on some of them as well.

That would be very likely. What versions of Myriad you have would all depend on what Adobe apps you've installed, assuming you haven't already purchased the fonts otherwise. Adobe does make corrections to the fonts without really telling anyone. The copy of of MyriadPro-It.otf I have is version 2.037, but the one in the Acrobat Reader X is 2.062. So those minor changes could determine if Myriad Pro works for you or not under 10.6.7.

Since 10.6.7 and possibly since installing an update to Google Earth the default fonts in Mail, Safari and iCal displays have changed to something that I don't recognize. The numbers and day names in iCal look much plainer as do the numbers signifying unread mail in Mail folders. And the numbers on my Safari yahoo stock tables. If this occurred during the system update, can I reinstall the update without fear of losing anything?

If this occurred during the system update, can I reinstall the update without fear of losing anything?

You could, but it would unlikely change what you're seeing. Try clearing the font cache files.

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.