font managment on osx

[Lammy]

bummer. . . .

Does your IT dept know the apples well?? I find most don't. i usually end up supporting most of my clients in that situation. They call me instead of their IT dept LOL!!

[dimitri]

no our it department only works on windows for the rest of the company, server issues and webstuff, email, lotus notes and other things.

that makes it sometimes frustrating, becouse as you know, often you know what you have to do, but you still have to call them and explain why and for what this is good or bad.

it's here the same, people who work on the macs know more about them then the "it" guys. but then again they never work on it.... and also don't care...

[Lammy]

ttt

[pspdfppd]

Sorry, aint' got no wisdom to pass on here except....as I have said for many years........


There's a 4 letter word beginning with "F."





FONT



Yeah? Well FONT you too!!!!!

[Sparky]

Lammy at a recent (dec 1 2003) seminar in Boston, An Apple tech rep said this: "what ever you do, do not remove 'LucidaGrande.dfont'. If you do the computer will not boot!" She said just about any other font could be moved and manipulated with a 3rd party font manager. I haven't tried taking all the fonts out of my System font folder but all the common ones have gone i.e. Helvetica.dfont, Times.dfont, etc. I have a "Start-up" set I have in Suitcase X1 set to be on permanantly at boot up. thse are the most common fonts I use all the time, Helvetic, Times New Roman, Garamond, Goudy, Futura, Myriad Pro, Zaph Dingbats, etc. The only time I run into problems is when I open a client job that may be years old and I get a missing font issue. (we used to have an old laser printer my boss bought in 1995 that came with it's own postscript fonts. DTC-Times etc. He used those on all his jobs before I started with him. Now some of the fonts have become corrupted and obsolete, so I have to swap out the fonts with new ones). In Suitcase I have set my preferences to always prefer my font folder so when an error telling me there are more than one instance of a font in Suitcase I respond with "Choose for Me" and have no problems.

[Lammy]

Thanks for the info Sparky. While the Mac OS may work with everything but LucidaGrande.dfont removed, there are some apps that won't work correct without others there. These include Safari and Mail as well as some of the Microsoft products. Just be careful out there :wink:

[cptucson]

Originally Posted by dimitri

anyway, now often when i want to open a font from suitcase i get often the errormessage that it conflict with a systemfont, i can work arround this problem, but often it includes restarting my machine.
and that's not sooo good.

I've found that sometimes just relaunching Suitcase is necessary. On other occassions, I have to quit Quark are some other app that won't forget the font it knows. Rarely do I have to restart the computer.

[Trinity]

Originally Posted by machan

Are there any drawbacks to Font Book (the bundled OS X font management app) besides no auto-activation?

Even though Font Book manages system fonts, it is really frutrating to see that it will copy (if you have set it up that way, otherwise it will move) all the fonts you activate/disactivate. Therefore if you have a magazine with 55 fonts, Font Book will copy them all in your Font System folder. As far as I know, that slows down Macs.

One other thing I saw in another thread was that OS X 10.3.5 does not diaply certain types of fonts, so it is better to go back to OS X 10.3.4 or live with the fonts that won't display.

I have a question now: how do you go back from OS X 10.3.5 to 10.3.4 once you already have 10.3.5?

[FLHunter]

After suffering with font problems with Quark 6 and other applications running on OSX we seemed to have found the solution!
Found this article: http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20000.html
Very informative and gives you the solution.....
Basically this is what it is:
We are not using any font management utility including Font Book
We work with many different clients and each job comes with their own fonts, when we get the job the fonts folder is "Copied" into the fonts folder in the Library. After the job is done this folder is deleted!
Inside the System-Library-Fonts, the only fonts that we have there are:

Geneva.dfont
Helvetica.dfont
Keyboard.dfont
LastResort.dfont
Lucidagrande.dfont
Monaco.dfont

Inside the "Users"-Library-Fonts we deleted all the fonts,this folder is empty!
We have been running for a month now doing the above and is working Great!
If you ever see garbled up fonts in documents, problem is in the fonts cache, go to www.elara.com and download the free utility: Font Cache Expunger, very easy to use and works great.

Hope this tips help!

[Trinity]

Thanks! That's great advice!