Regarding Kurt Lang’s font article: indesign2 in Snow Leopard

By "indesign 2", do you mean CS2, or literally version 2. I'm assuming CS2 since I know v.2 won't even run in Snow Leopard.

If you pared the fonts down according to my article, then that means you manually moved or deleted fonts from the hard drive. Font Book is a very unhappy camper when you do that. It seems to be unable to correct its database when fonts are moved around by the user.

Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key when you hear the startup chime to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding the Shift key 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 clear Font Book's database and the cache files of the user account you logged into in Safe Mode.

Next, 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

Terminal will then ask for you to enter your admin password. As you type, it will not show anything, so be sure to enter it correctly.

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.

Things should be working correctly at this point.

IMHO, your question is a little too specialised for this venue. You'd probably have better luck on an InDesign forum, such as Adobe's or InDesign Talk . On the latter you can find quite a few grizzled ID veterans; although I doubt many are running ID v2 under SL. Keep in mind that it's PPC and Adobe did not support it beyond Tiger, so it may not be worth your while to troubleshoot it. (I believe ID CS3, aka ID v5, is the oldest version supported under SL.)

Btw, I'm not sure you read Kurt Lang's paper closely enough. For instance, you say something about letting "fontbook" placing fonts "in a single folder", whereas he says quite clearly that,

Starting with Leopard, Font Book includes the ability to open fonts in place. To do so, you need to choose File > New Library from the menu. Make sure the Library you created is highlighted and add your fonts. Rather than copying every font you activate to the Fonts folder chosen in Font Book's preferences, the fonts are activated from wherever they reside.

For instance, you say something about letting "fontbook" placing fonts "in a single folder",

Well actually, he didn't say that. It was:

I'm managing, and want to continue to manage, fonts in their original finder folders rather than let fontbook have them in a single folder.

Meaning he already is using the Library function to open fonts in place rather than letting Font Book pile them up in one of the two Fonts folders it normally gathers fonts in.

Not sure about the CS2 suite, but you certainly shouldn't be having those problems with Office 2008. Since you've already done the Safe Mode boot and Terminal command to clear all font caches, then I would have to suspect the font collections are damaged.

Shut down Font Book. Go to your user account at ~/Library/FontCollections/ and put all of the collections in the trash.

Relaunch Font Book and create a new set with any randomly chosen fonts. Does CS2 and Office see them now?

markus --

Kurt is always happy to help, so don't worry about that . . .

Can you tell us again exactly what you did when you pared down?

Thing is CS2 did work before the slimming session.

Maybe you could copy and paste the list of fonts you have in your System folder and your Library folder?

I hate to suggest it, but it's looking like it's time to reinstall Snow Leopard. We've tried the usual simpler steps directly involving Font Book and cache files, and still haven't gotten any results.

I was helping someone else (not on these forums) last week and it came down to reinstalling to fix it. In that case, and possibly yours, elements of the OS itself (like the font engine) were damaged, and nothing but a reinstall would straighten things out.

Troubleshooting computer issues is not always very difficult, but you do have to approach it very methodically and precisely, and attempt as much as possible to isolate the problem.

So you started with a font issue in "indesign 2". The next step is, do other, unrelated apps display the same issue?

So you've tried Office 2008 and Quark, and they did; but iMovie and SketchUp did not.

(Btw, when you try a different app, it's best to start with the basics, such as TextEdit; and when you ask for help it's a good idea to specify what versions you've tried.)

What now? Well, look at the apps that have the problem -- do they have anything in common? Maybe they're older versions, but Office 2008 (with the latest updates) is supported under SL. So, anything else? Actually, yes, there is. All three (Adobe, MS, Quark) maintain private font caches. So the next step is to eliminate the possibility that these caches are the problem. Onyx does this specific job (look under Cleaning > Fonts); alternatively, you can do it yourself (eg, see Microsoft KB 313535).

gee, I thought markus was doing just fine, and getting great advice.