If there is a forum for font issues, please redirect me.

I have reorganized my fonts, putting all of my fonts in the System 9 fonts folder, as I run both OS9 and OS10.3. Have a new G4.
I am having an issue now with both my ITC Garamond and my Adobe Garamond fonts. Both have a few family members that are showing incorrectly on screen in Quark with odd symbols and ligatures, as if a different keyboard configuration were applied to them. And each font shows slightly different wrong characters for the same sentence. I did some sorting out of the fonts, removing them from the fonts folder, eliminating some duplications and generally making sure the pairs of screen and printer fonts were intact, then reinstalled them in the OSX fonts folder so I could deal with them separately from my other fonts. This time the same thing happened but with different family members. Two that were wrong before were right now, and two others were now wrong on the screen. All of these fonts have printed correctly by the way.
Any clue what is going on here?

This sounds lke something Mr. Freakyclean can help you with.

Welcome to the board. :)

Welcome to the Forum first of all.

Fonts and Classic (OS9) are a big pain.

The best way to handle fonts IMHO is to buy suitcase X1 and totally uninstall all your fonts in your Classic system fonts folder. I actually haven't tried removing all of them but I just read about this yesterday in a pre-press article. You then use Suitcase to install all your fonts for Classic and OSX. This is what I have used for the last 2.5 years and it works well.

I haven't heard of the problem with Garamond before but have had problems with Helvetica.

Not sure what else to tell you to check.

Do you have a lot of fonts installed? Sometimes that causes very wierd problems.

When the fonts are wierd on screen are they like that on prints?

Do you have known good versions of the fonts in question? Like from an original cd or a file that was used to print in the past that worked fine, if so replace the ones on the system with these.

Also, I assume this is a postscript font, so there should be two parts, a screen font and a printer font. If the screen font is missing then it will look wonky on screen.

Suitcase also has a checker for corrupt fonts. It could be a totally unrelated font that is causing the problems.

:)

Well, thank you for the warm welcome, didn't expect that. Sorry don't know what IMHO is.
Have had Suitcase in the past and had nothing but trouble with it. I don't have that many fonts, maybe 125. I simply take them out of the font folder if I want to disable them or turn them off using FontBook (which is about all it's good for). I have been studying font issues for years and am almost as confused now as I've ever been.
The fonts that look garbled on screen print fine. Someone suggested that I use Mark Douma's Font Cache Cleaner. But my supervisor has questions about it that I can't answer. I don't have pristine versions of the fonts available to reinstall (long story). Yes, they are PostScript fonts.
When I used Suitcase, I could never figure out how it reported corrupted fonts. Maybe I never had any. I didn't find their documentation all that comprehensive.
Gosh, it's no wonder they call fonts the "F" word.
What do you do when you drag a font to the fonts folder, restart, and the fonts don't show up in your menus, or just some family members do and others not? It seems my font issues are endless.
Okay, Mr. Freakyclean, what can you do for me?
Thanks, for your help, I really appreciate your time.

Here's another issue I'm having (sigh): Using Quark 6.1 on OSX10.3 am getting "font may be corrupted and may be substituted by Courier" errors after giving print command (various fonts), but usually it prints fine. However, have had it substitute a couple of times.
I also get 'missing font' messages, when opening files, for my Helvetica and Zapf Dings, and of course they are there. What's up with that?

Hmm Lots of questions/problems

- If a font looks garbled on screen and prints fine then it is a Type 1 postscript font and you are either missing the screen font or it is corrupt or you are running OS9 without ATM lite installed (which smoothes the fonts on screen)

-Suitcase has options in the preference as to what to do with installing corrupt fonts and a corrupt font finder under one of the menus. I'm not sure which menu as I'm on my home PC right now. I'm also not sure which version added the corrupt font finding ability.

-I have a feeling that the missing font problem with Zapf and such is probably to do with the fact that OSX uses a dfont version of those fonts, where in OS9 you would have had True Type or Type one versions. This being the case Quark wouldn't/shouldn't recognize that it is a different version of the same font and say it's missing. You can install the True Type (or Type 1) version that you used in OS9 because there is already a version installed (the Dfont one).

- The Quark problem with the font substitution/corruption I will take a wild stab at (not having used Quark 6). One thing that might be happening is that Quark 6 may not like fonts that were falsely bolded, italicized and such using the measurements pallet. Using the measurements pallet didn't use the bold
(or whatever) version of a font it just faked it. Many PostScript devices didn't like this at all. OSX being native PostScript may not like it either and that could be why Quark is giving you the warning. When this problem happened with PostScript devices it was rather intermittent and there wasn't really any logic as to when it would work or not. If this isn't the problem then I would guess it is just a Quark issue.

-With Suitcase I never restart the computer to install fonts. As to why some show up when installed into the font’s folder and some don't? Probably either the font or part of it is corrupt, or what you have it not a font file but looks like one, or you have two font "suitcases" with duplicate fonts in them, or your missing part of the font.

The way I have my Pre-press computer setup is I have Suitcase X1 installed and have a folder with every single font I have in it. I add this folder to suitcase, making sure that Suitcase is not set to activate fonts automatically. From there I can scan all the fonts to find corrupt ones and I can see if there are any that are missing parts of the font (screen or printer font). When I need a font I can do a little search in Suitcase and just activate what I need.
I have been using Suitcase since version 3 and haven't really had any problems with it. Maybe I have just used all the good versions.

Hope some of this helps


:)

How nice of you Freakyclean, to take all this time to help me out.

I can't find ATM lite on my computer, but the fonts in question are not displaying jagged, they are showing a garbled keyboard, wierd symbols and ligatures. It has been suggested that I need to get a font cache cleaning utility. But at work here they don't know anything about that, so I had to submit the info to the tech support guy and I'm pretty low on his list.

I have Suitcase 10. Maybe we should reinstall it. I just hated it before, but then I don't think I've ever understood how this stuff works.

I do have my own Zapf and Hell-vetica installed besides the dfont ones.

I never use the character palette to format text, I don't PostScript doesn't like that.

Gotta go, it's 5. Thanks again for your thoughts, much appreciated.

>> If there is a forum for font issues, please redirect me.

Subject: Quark Express and font problems, Mac OS X, Font Cache

hi colleenp, there is a known problem with Mac OS X and font cache and here's a page of links to help with all kinds of Quark Xpress tutorials and templates. If you browse through there, you'll se a couple of relative links that will help with this problem. Good Luck.

Quark Xpress Blog, Quark Express Tutorials & Templates Links (http://quark-xpress-tutorial.blogspot.com)

Also, there's a good free xtension called FontAlertSilencer XT that you can browse for and download here at this link, I recommend that too if you are using Quark Xpress 6 and having font error messages.

Free Quark Xpress Download Quark Express Software & Xtensions (http://www.blogigo.co.uk/quark_xpress_downloads_quark_download_quark_xpress)
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