Font Book crashes when trying to remove corrupt fonts

danas_blia wrote:

I am using a standard Lithuanian keyboard layout provided by Apple and I was using exactly the same in Leopard

Apple's Lithuanian keyboard only works with Unicode fonts. If they worked before, they should work now. If you ever used non-Uncode (most likely old PS) fonts, then these would either use the US layout or require a custom layout, and it's possible such fonts may stop working at all.

So you really cannot type Lithuanian in TextEdit with Apple's keyboard?

danas_blia wrote:

I can type Lithuanian perfectly, but not with those fonts - that's what I meant.

Could you provide the name of a common font you have which does not work for Lithuanian (and perhaps send me a copy -- tom at bluesky dot org). It seems unlikely that you have so many non-Unicode fonts, perhaps something else is amiss...

Kurt, please tell me a bit more about this procedure. Never did a clean install on Mac on a spare drive, while working on the main one...

In short, you're just using a separate erased drive/partition to install the OS and your apps from scratch.

Can I install the OS on another drive while keeping working on the same computer?

Yes, that's what I do. You can install OS X on as many separate drives/partitions as you have.

What I do is gradually work my way into a new OS. Like right now, I'm still doing all of my real work in Snow Leopard, while on a separate drive mounted in my Mac Pro, I have Mountain Lion installed. That way, I can keep an eye on updates and see how the OS progresses and initial bugs are worked out.

When I was moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard, SL was a complete rewrite to full 64 bit. 10.6.0 was loaded with major issues that made it unusable for production work. Fonts, especially Type 1 PostScript, were a complete mess. ColorSync was way off. It took until 10.6.3 for SL to be ready for real work. But it didn't bother me. I kept working from the main drive in 10.5.x as I kept an eye on SL's progress.

That's what I'm doing with Mountain Lion (I skipped Lion completely). Some tools I need still don't work, or haven't yet been updated for ML. Overall though, it appears to be a very clean OS. So I'm still in watch mode as I continue to use Snow Leopard day-to-day.

How then I migrate all my system to my main drive?

By "system", I presume you mean the rest of your third party apps and personal data? If so, I never move those, either. The purpose is to keep the drive completely clean. I reinstall all apps I use from scratch onto the new OS. I don't want any garbage, damaged files, old OS files or prefs brought over. The few I will copy from my current drive is things like all of the preference files from my user account for the Adobe apps so I don't have to set all of my palettes and preferred settings all over again. Otherwise, pretty much everything else gets left behind.

Will I be able to restore files from Time Machine from a backup that was made in Leopard? (just in case)...

You can, but I don't use Time Machine, so can't say exactly how that would work. If it just copies over everything that doesn't exist onto the new OS, then you've defeated the purpose of leaving old, outdated, or possibly corrupt data behind. Pick and choose from the TM backup to only bring in what is absolutely necessary. Which of course is any files you've created, your email data and other specific items. That does mean though that you need to know where this stuff is in the first place. Rather hard to do if you don't.

Thanks for sending the font!

It is a non-Unicode version from 1996. If you try to input Lithuanian special characters from it using Apple's Lithuanian keyboard, you will either get nothing or the correct character taken from another font, depending on the app. If you happen to have a Unicode version of the same font on your machine, it would probably all look correct.

If you only have the non-Unicode version of that font, to input the special characters you would use the Apple US (or actually preferably the Icelandic) keyboard layout and pretend you were inputting something else. The graphic below shows standard input in Arial and the result when you switch to the non-Unicode font. Some apps may not do this very well, I used OpenOffice.

PS The encoding of the font you sent is a bit strange. It conforms to the old the Win-1257 (Baltic), but only for the 18 special characters in Lithuanian. All the other non-ascii characters normally found in a Win-1257 font are missing.

danas_blia wrote:

I didnt manage to find how to type them with the Icelandic or American keyboard eyther - how did you do it?

With OpenOffice and the US keyboard, I set the font to Century Gothic and then typed option/alt + `, then a. With normal fonts this produces à, with Century Gothic it produces ą .

You can convert fonts with a font editor, like FontLab or FontForge, but they are not very easy to use.