Hi Gary,

I've been having the same problems for months and months with Suitcase. As you know, the bad previewing is because your font caches are corrupted. This is a well-known issue that has many factors which contribute to overall system and application instability with fonts on OS X. I have emailed Extensis repeatedly, and they simply do not respond with any helpful information. Having a near-monopoly on font auto-activation software for Mac OS X never made them very responsive, and now that they bought their only competition Font Reserve, don't expect it to get better. MacFixIt covered these problems last month at the link below. Read through the comments for additional good info on how Adobe apps and 10.3 contribute to the problem.

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20031205015538904&query=suitcase

One word of advice; you don't need to manually remove all your fonts first from Suitcase before beginning these repair procedures. That is a lengthy wait as Suitcase spins the beachball; instead you can cut to the chase while you're in the Home > Library > Preferences folder deleting that com.extensis.plist file. Go ahead and trash the Suitcase folder as well. Deleting those two files will completely remove all info on your preferences for Suitcase AND will remove the database of fonts. Don't worry about frequently nuking these files, we do it daily at my agency. The registration key is stored elsewhere, so you can safely remove these files as often as you like and Suitcase will regenerate them on starting up the program again.

Check out my list of steps in the MacFixIt link above, it works well. The preferences deletion step was left out of the MacFixIt article linked above; that is key as you discovered. Here's some additional info: After step 6 when the machine reboots, open Suitcase and set your preferences up. On the General tab, uncheck all the "Scan for corrupt fonts" checkboxes. On the Activation tab, uncheck "Activate fonts when added to Suitcase", check the "When duplicate fonts are found: Prefer PostScript font" option, and select "When a font conflict occurs: Activate the requested font". Click OK, then go ahead and add your font set back to Suitcase by dropping and dragging it into the bottom window.

Someday perhaps Adobe/Apple/Extensis will once and for all solve the font management, conflict, and cache issues in OS X. Until then we have no other option but to use Suitcase as no other software will auto-activate fonts in Illustrator, InDesign, and Quark.

Good Luck,

Joe

Actually, a font management program called FontAgent Pro (from Insider software) features auto activation in all Adobe apps and Quark (4,5,6). It is a stronger program than Suitcase or Font Reserve and even features font repair (this is part of the program not a 3rd party addition). Activation recalls the user interface of ATM, fonts can be searched and the type display is far superior to the other apps.