My gf is a book designer/ publisher of many years’ experience. In the last few weeks she’s being migrating onto a nice new G5 with Mac OS X 10.3 on it, from OS 9. Consequently she was forced to upgrade versions of almost every app and utility she’s used to.
She is having terrible problems with fonts. As a book designer she has to have literally hundreds of thousands of fonts on her machine, and also needs to keep fonts used associated with each publishing job with that job in some way.
She constantly finds that fonts will display but not print or come out in PDF, or come up as corrupt when she knows they are OK, or some subfonts (eg the italic version or whatever) are missing, all sorts of problems. After a quick look around her machine, despite being quite new, I found there are fonts stored in several folders already, and it’s not clear how they get put there or by what app.
She just doesn’t have time to sit down for several days and sort though all the options in all the apps she has and work out what’s going on. What I’m after, I guess, is some sort of reassurance that this is not the general experience for people working in this area, and what we can do or look at to sort it all out.
One of the main issues seems to be that no matter what you do you cannot just dump all fonts in one folder, system or not, and have them all available to all apps all the time. It’s not clear to me why not but she assures me it is so. I would have thought the entire reason for the existence of apps like Suitcase is this, but it seems only a partial solutuon at best.
So, in the phrase that I as a PC support person absolutely detest, “any ideas?” Thanks anyone for any help.
I can’t help you much. If you haven’t already, you should look at Apple’s “Font Book” program in the Applications folder and make sure all the necessary fonts are enabled. I’m not sure how well that will handle hundreds of thousands of font’s, though; I believe Suitcase is supposed to be able to take the place of Font Book completely.
Your problems might be related to fonts in one of OS X’s font folders being unavailable to programs running in the Classic (OS 9) environment. It’s been years since I’ve had to use Classic for serious work, so I can’t help you there. I believe that fonts in the OS 9 font folder are available to OS X, but only while Classic is running. I had some font problems in a few documents until I figured that out.
Thx a lot for the response! I was dreading it was too specialised a Q to draw any reply.
AFAIK she’s not running in Classic mode, but it’s a good thing to make sure of, true. And yes, I too think Suitcase is supposed to take the place of the Font Book - but of course you need System fonts left in the System area, Suitcase fonts where it wants them to be, fonts used in a particular job to be with that job … it’s a nightmare of organisation!
She’s also had folks saying she should get rid of all TT fonts, others saying only use TT fonts … ugh! It’s hard being the only Mac person in your company.
Fonts in OS X can be difficult. I can only offer the suggestion that fonts in OS X can be in (at least) three different locations:
/Library/Fonts/
~/Library/Fonts/
/System Folder/Fonts/
Fonts in the first folder are available to all OS X users. Fonts in the second folder are available only to the individual OS X user. Fonts in the third folder are available to all OS X users and in Classic.
Very strange things can occur when you have the same font in more than one location.
Yeah, we’re find this out 
She only discovered the ones in her user folder a couple of days ago, the concept of the multi-user machine is a bit new to her. As she’s the only actual user on the machine it’s a complication we don’t need. Not to mention that copies of fonts in use have to be kept in a folder with each job completed!
I see there are acknowledged problems with fonts and font handling in OS X 10.3.5, supposedly fixed on 10.3.6, so that’s the next thing to check.
We’ve also just been pointed to Font Agent Pro as the answer to all our problems, will have a look at that.
Thnaks all so far, all contributions appreciated!