Tiger and Fonts and Creative Suite 2

Hi Scott,

Have you thought about using Linotype FontExplorer X to manage your fonts? It's like iTunes for Fonts, really slick and it works perfectly with CS2.

Just a thought,

Regards,

Jamie

The best thing about FontExplorer is it's free, so you have nothing to lose.

It also has a lot of built in maintenance stuff, like clean System font caches and clean Application font caches, so if things do get corrupt you can clean and restart.

I've been using it in our studio of about 10 Macs for the last few months and it has solved a LOT of issues that we were having when using Suitcase XI.

Regards,

Jamie

Hi Scott,

Anything you could want to know about which fonts you can remove from OS X and where they are can be found are in my article Font Management in Mac OS X Tiger and Panther.

Hi Kurt,

I just read (the first part of) your very interesting article and started checking whether the necessary fonts were activated -- which some of them were not.

Unfortunately, Fontbook (that weird and inadequate program) will not activate them though they are available on my computer (of course, in several different locations).

Du you have any suggestions on how to force activation? Keyboard.dfont and Lastresort.dfont are not listed in Fontbook's Alle Fonts list-- and will not be listed -- Tahoma is listed but remains deactivated.

iSight iMac 20" 2.1 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Keyboard.dfont and Lastresort.dfont and hidden in Font Book since Apple would prefer you didn't even know they exist. In general, it sounds like you need to reset Font Book. What amounts to rebuilding its database. You can find the instructions to do that in Undoing Font Book.

Hi Jamie,

I downloaded FontExplorer and was just beginning to install it when the installation program asked whether I wanted FontExplorer to move fonts to a new location (a FontExplorer font library) or leave them in their original places??? As I understand Kurt's article mentioned in this forum, some fonts are supposed to be in particular places?

And what do I do about Fontbook? Do I deactivate Fontbook and let FontExplorer take over -- or do the two work together? (I guess not!)

iSight iMac 20" 2.1 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Kurt: Thx for the advice! Undoing Fontbook doesn't seem like something one should embark on lightheartedly!

And Jamie:

I downloaded FontExplorer and was just beginning to install it when the installation program asked whether I wanted FontExplorer to move fonts to a new location (a FontExplorer font library) or leave them in their original places??? As I understand Kurt's article mentioned in this forum, some fonts are supposed to be in particular places?

And what do I do about Fontbook? Do I deactivate Fontbook and let FontExplorer take over -- or do the two work together? (I guess not!)

iSight iMac 20" 2.1 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

You should only have one font manager on your system at a time. Otherwise, they're constantly fighting each other for control of your fonts. You'll end up with things like deactivating a font in one manager, but finding the font still active in all of your applications. That, because the other font manager still has the font active.

If you want to move to FontExplorer X, then remove Font Book from your Mac. Put the application on another disk for easy retrieval if you want to go back to Font Book. But otherwise, delete it from your hard drive.

How you want FontExplorer X to behave is up to you. The fonts it wants to move should only be those in the /Library/Fonts/ folder and those in the Fonts folder of your user account. It shouldn't be touching those in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. In this mode, FontExplorer X behaves in the same manner as Font Agent Pro. I prefer to leave my fonts where they are and activate them via an alias. In this way, it would behave like Suitcase. It's up to you how you want the application to handle your fonts.

Thanks again!!! My plan is to cross my fingers and spend some time over Christmas to try and switch to FontExplorer.

One of the things about Fontbook that I find particularly enervating is that it's impossible (I think) to figure out which of my multiple copies of a number of fonts are activated and which are not.

Some time ago, I found out that I was using TrueType versions of some fonts for a brochure. It printed alright -- but having been around for many years, I believe that Postscript fonts are better than TrueType (I don't know if this is still so...). I then removed the TT fonts and activated the Postscript equivalents.

Later, when I was reprinting the brochure, InDesign warned me that the TT fonts were missing. I decided to try my luck, made a PDF using the "wrong" fonts, and Acrobat warned me that the fonts were not embedded -- but to my great surprise, the prepress people said that it made no difference! The brochure was printed and, indeed, there is no difference!

So now I'm completely confused! But I'd like to manage my fonts and not just plunge ahead and trust my luck.

iSight iMac 20" 2.1 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)