Q: Help - Font Book and font Library doesn't work
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Jan 8, 2015 6:33 PMby baltwo,See Font Management in OS X for starters.
27" i7 iMac (Mid 2011) refurb, OS X Yo (10.10.1), Mavs, ML & SL, G4 450 MP w/10.5 & 9.2.2
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Jan 8, 2015 9:46 PMby poth1,Many thanks for these two replies. I did the first with no result. So I took the advice of the second and downloaded Font Explorer.
Font Explorer at least gave me a message that "no fonts with the specified formats were found" when I tried to import the missing fonts from their folder. (Font Book, just seemed to be trying with no result and no message)
I'm not sure why this is, as the fonts were being used until the beginning of the week on my old computer and are directly copied off that computer and placed on this one into a folder in the same place. They are fonts I have bought and are the likes of Adobe Garamond and Faceplate. But at least I know it is some kind of "trouble" with the fonts not Font Book. What that trouble is, I don't know – and even the .sit file of the original downloaded font won't open, and copying over again won't get them to work. OK, the leap from 10.6.8 to the new computer at 10.10 was large, but fonts and .sit files should still work!
So I'm still mystified but at least have some other direction to investigate!
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Jan 9, 2015 9:07 AMby kahjot,Do you still have the old computer? I hope so, because you could unstuff the .sit archives there. I think you might also be able to find Stuffit Expander to use on your your new system, assuming it's still being updated. There has been little to no need for it for quite a while.
What kind of fonts are they? Type 1 Postscript? They ought to work.
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Jan 9, 2015 4:09 PMby poth1,I do have the old computer. And your response made me think I also have my old laptop with the fonts on. Although I had tried copying again from my old desktop, they still didn't work. But copying the fonts from the laptop … worked!
I have no idea what the glitch was, but fortunately I had an alternative source and your responses have been helpful with information and prompts – many thanks.
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Jan 10, 2015 9:17 AMby Kurt Lang,We see posts like this here all the time. A person upgrades to a new OS, and Font Book suddenly stops working. Usually, the problem is that Font Book's database has been trashed by the upgrade with the very common symptoms you're seeing. You suddenly can't add fonts, and fonts Font Book says are open don't appear in some, or any apps.
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 you see a progress bar towards the bottom of the screen. You can let go of the Shift key at that point. Yosemite is a bit different. Whether it's a Safe Mode boot or a normal one, you get the same progress bar. It just takes longer to get to the desktop in Safe Mode. So hold the Shift key until you get to the desktop.
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.
If that alone doesn't do it (it should), then clear out all of the font cache data.
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 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 the current logged in user account. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.
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Jan 10, 2015 4:12 PMby Kurt Lang,It really just comes down to whether or not Font Book's database gets mangled during the upgrade. If you use a third party manager, it's best to completely remove Font Book. Having more than on manager at a time on your system is just a constant source of the font manager apps fighting over control of your fonts.
