Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard

Learn how to solve your font problems today!

Are you suffering from mysterious font problems using Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, or other programs in Mac OS X Leopard? Help is at hand, with troubleshooting steps and real-world advice that help you solve problems fast. If you've experienced seemingly inexplicable trouble with characters displaying incorrectly, being unable to type a particular character, fonts missing from Font menus, Font Book crashing, or Character Palette misbehaving, turn to font expert Sharon Zardetto for help.

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Contents & Intro
What’s New
FAQ
Blog

Read Me First
Introduction
Quick Start
Know What and Where Your Fonts Are
Take Preventive Measures and Plan Ahead
Learn Troubleshooting Procedures
Tackle General Font Problems
Fix Font Book Problems
Manage Input Menu Items
Solve Other Specific Problems
Appendix A: Supported Font Types
Appendix B: Leopard Font Tables
Appendix C: Users and Accounts
Appendix D: The World According to Glyphs
About This Book

Read Me First

Welcome to Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard, version 1.0. This book is all about Mac OS X font problems: what they are, what causes them and, of course, how to fix them. It covers both general and very specific problems that you might encounter in using your Mac, its font-related utilities, and the most popular applications, including Safari, Microsoft Office, and Adobe's Creative Suite. This ebook was written by Sharon Zardetto Aker, edited by Tonya Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.

Introduction

Font problems are a fact of computer life. They shouldn't be, but they are anyway.

Often the problems are very minor—why can't I type a checkmark in this font with Option-V? Sometimes they're a little more pervasive: Why isn't that font showing in the Font menu? Why can't I empty the Trash when this font is in it? Why can't I get Character Palette to stay listed in the Input menu? And other times they're dire: Why is Font Book crashing every time I open it? Why is every menu and dialog filled with garbled text?

This book covers font problems large and small, general and specific. I provide detailed, step-by-step descriptions of the troubleshooting techniques you need to know, whether it's trashing a plist, deleting a font cache, or starting up in Safe Mode. (That last item, by the way—almost every description of it you've read it lacks an important detail regarding font problems!)

What's not included: A major area of "font problems" that's not covered in this book is problems that occur with third-party font-management software like Suitcase Fusion, FontAgent Pro, and Linotype FontExplorer X. Third-party programs change too often to be reasonably covered in that way in a book—even an ebook version that can be updated more easily than a printed volume.

This book is a companion volume to Take Control of Fonts in Leopard

I started out with one standard-sized Take Control ebook. It grew sort of long. Then it got fairly huge. Then humongous became the operative term. Then my publishers said it wouldn't work as one PDF in terms of the sheer size. So, we decided to split off the bulk of the content about font problems into another ebook, with enough re-tooling so it would work as a standalone volume. And here it is!

I don't mind admitting that it was extremely difficult to figure out what general, background information should be included in this ebook, when it's all detailed in Take Control of Fonts in Leopard.

I don't want to make you buy that ebook (though if you did, we'd both be happy) for related, but not problem-specific material. On the other hand, I don't want to repeat myself here too much and lead you to think that this ebook is a collection of reprints. (Don't you hate TV shows that claim to be "NEW! episodes" but are just clips collected from earlier in the season?) Yet, on the other other hand, there's a certain amount of background information that's necessary, and another amount that's useful, for clarification of some points.

So, I settled on these main "crossover" items from Take Control of Fonts in Leopard: a synopsis of the information about what kinds of fonts Leopard uses and where they're stored; a short but important topic in its entirety, turned into Appendix D: The World According to Glyphs; information about the importance of single-family suitcase files; and, for your reference convenience, the same general appendices. I mention all this so that if you bought this ebook individually, and then buy the other, you won't feel you've been fooled or cheated. (At about 220 pages, there's way more information in the other ebook than I've excerpted here! This is also why there's a discount if you buy both books; look over to the left.)

"I read both books and was impressed by their accuracy and completeness."
-John Collins, MyFonts

A special note about the figures

Also "copied" from Take Control of Fonts in Leopard is the concept of using characters buried in basic fonts to point, circle, or otherwise label items in screenshots. The characters, always in red, are identified in the margin by their Unicode IDs or GIDs (glyph IDs)—or both, when a character has both. The two-fold purpose behind this is to make you aware of the scope of non-alphabetic characters most fonts contain, and to get you comfortable with the idea of referencing characters by their various IDs. (You can use Character Palette's search function to find these characters by their Unicode IDs.)

Quick Start to Font Problems in Leopard

Solving a font-related problem is a simple two-step process: figure out what's causing the problem, and then fix it. Okay, maybe it's not that simple: symptoms can have many causes, and causes have many possible fixes. But with this book, you can both narrow down symptoms to a probable cause and look up the cure most likely to work. And, you'll learn to avoid some problems altogether.

If you're not in font trouble right now:

Review the basics in Know What and Where Your Fonts Are.
Read Take Preventive Measures and Plan Ahead, and implement its suggestions.

Otherwise, come back to these sections as soon as you're back on track so you won't be derailed again.

If you're unfamiliar with Mac troubleshooting methods:

Check Table 3, "Testing and Fix-it Procedures," for a list of the techniques you'll need for analyzing and solving font problems.
Review the specific details for all the techniques in Learn Troubleshooting Procedures.
Note that Table 2, "Font Troubleshooting and Maintenance Tools," describes the software utilities you'll need for some of the solutions (most of them are provided with Leopard).

If you're having a problem:

If you don't know whether it's a font problem or a system problem, review Table 5, "Laying the Blame,".
If you suspect it's font-related but you can't pinpoint it, try the steps in Tackle General Font Problems.
If you have a problem that seems specific, try one of these topics:

Fix Font Book Problems
Manage Input Menu Items
Font Files and Icons
PostScript Fonts
Font Menus and the Font Panel
Font and Character Formatting
Safari
Microsoft Office
Adobe Applications
PDF Peculiarities
Document-Exchange Issues

What's New in the Leopard Edition

The changes in this book from its Tiger edition are, in their way, almost as drastic as the changes that took us from Tiger to Leopard. This book is 30 percent longer than its last incarnation as a result of three types of changes: those due to Leopard, those due to other new products in the last two years, and those due to a chance to rewrite and reorganize both this book and its companion volume, Take Control of Fonts in Leopard.

Because It's Leopard

Leopard was, in many ways a sea change for Mac OS X. While most of its flashiest components (Time Machine, Spaces, Dock stacks, and so on) have nothing to do with fonts, and some font-related improvements have nothing to do with problems (more-stable font caches, printing from Font Book), there are, of course, inevitable new problems either with font management or new ways to approach old problems.

These include:

Font caches aren't the bugaboo they were in Tiger; they're much more stable and seldom cause problems. But when they do, they're harder to get at because they're stored differently from before. Delete Leopard's Font Caches explains it all.
Different problems, though most are minor, come with Leopard's font utilities, so there are new entries for The Input Menu, Character Palette, and Keyboard Viewer in the Manage Input Menu Items section.
Under Solve Other Specific Problems, there are new entries for Font Files and Icons and Font Menus and the Font Panel. In the former, I deal with how the System Fonts folder works now, refusing to let you just drag fonts out to remove them, and even magically replacing certain fonts that you manage to remove.
Some of Leopard's new or improved features also changed seemingly unrelated information. For instance, its improved and more powerful Spotlight capabilities come in handy when you do special searches to Delete Adobe Font Caches, and instead of creating a new account for testing purposes, you can use the built-in Guest account, as described in Try a Clean User Account.

And, because Leopard dropped support for the Classic (faux-OS) environment, that section has been removed from this edition.

Because Other Things Are New

Since I wrote the last edition of this book, both Adobe CS3 and CS4, as well as Microsoft Office 2008, came out. So:

Delete the Microsoft Office Font Cache includes information about both the 2004 and 2008 and versions.
Delete Adobe Font Caches covers the cache files for all the Creative Suite versions as well as other (reasonably) old and the latest versions of other Adobe products.

Because I Was Updating This Book and Its Companion Volume

As the other volume, Take Control of Fonts in Leopard, expanded, it crowded out information that was mostly about problems. That information, updated and rewritten as necessary, provided new material in the Solve Other Specific Problems section: a reworking of the existing Safari subsection, and two new subsections, PDF Peculiarities and Document-Exchange Issues. Also, Tackle General Font Problems has been reorganized and rewritten.

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Book Info

iPad & Kindle

About the Author

Book Reviews

Reviews of Previous Editions

Author Interviews

Table of Contents

Read Me First

Introduction

This book is a companion volume to Take Control of Fonts in Leopard

Quick Start to Font Problems in Leopard

If you're not in font trouble right now:

If you're unfamiliar with Mac troubleshooting methods:

If you're having a problem:

What's New in the Leopard Edition

Because It's Leopard

Because Other Things Are New

Because I Was Updating This Book and Its Companion Volume

Don't you also have a general ebook about fonts?

I want help with font problems, but I'm running an older version of Mac OS X

Does this ebook cover third-party font utilities?

Can I read this ebook on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle?

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