Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Ahh, the good ol' days...' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Ahh, the good ol' days...
Authored by: GORDYmac on May 07, '04 10:53:04AM

Remember when we didn't have to think about System Fonts?



[ Reply to This | # ]
Ahh, the good ol' days...
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on May 12, '04 01:40:47PM

That depends on what you do with your Mac. Since I work in design and publishing, I always had to manage my system fonts... way back to System 7. The idea was, and still is, to remove everything in the system fonts folder except the necessary system fonts, which for pre OS X systems was Chicago/Charcoal, and it never hurt to keep Geneva around.

Now Apple has made Helvetica a system font, which was a big mistake as far as I'm concerned. They should have stuck with Geneva, which is a Helvetica copy.



[ Reply to This | # ]
some more tips and the BAD OLD DAYS
Authored by: PokéMac on May 13, '04 09:19:16PM

It's also a big help to make sure you replace Arial and Times New Roman with their LATEST versions instead of settling for Apple's bundled versions.. they are BUGGY and will eventually result in your downfall.. they are available from, oddly enough, Microsoft..

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d1d378f9-9b31-4cb3-a022-c9148427a8c3&displaylang=en

If you bought Office X, those versions are included in the Fonts folder inside the common Office folder.

Also, whenever you add fonts to your Fonts folder it's a good idea to use 'sudo diskutil repairPermissions ~/Library/Fonts.. according to a note on Macintouch, Quark INSISTS that all fonts have the system default font permission of:

Owner: system
Read and Write
Group: admin
Read and Write
All Others: Read Only

A good way to see if a font is corrupted is to open a Finder window (most usually in my experience I look in System Folder/Fonts first) and then open Font Book and see if any are missing in the All Fonts window. If it's visible in the Finder window and it isn't in Font Book, I would trash the font immediately or at least move it out of harms way into another (Disabled) folder. I did this for one designer who still was working from an original copy of several font suitcases taken from a FLOPPY disk and it turned out that except for the Extended version all others were corrupt!

Yes, as I recall, you could have a maximum of 128 font SUITCASES in pre 9.1 systems but you could embed as many screen fonts as you possibly wanted into each suitcase. It was amazing to see people drag their homemade flavors of Zapf Gramelvetica Sans Brains into the System Folder and then whine when their Quark documents got corrupted, their machine kept rebooting, their boyfriend / girlfriend left them, their dog got run over by a garbage truck.. absolute voodoo.

I just don't agree with some of what's been said here. Hmm, throw out Apple's fonts and force the system to dip into the CLASSIC System folder to get fonts?! As Scotty said, "How QUAINT!" Do that and you may as well forget about running any iApps or just keep praying your next Apple app will never access any of the fonts you tossed out, even though it's a reasonable expectation of Apple's that you will never TOUCH them?

When Quark came out with their native OS X version I nuked my (OS 9) System Folder and have slept soundly (and not crashed) since. My Classic prefpane has NO classic folder selected and this eliminates any temptation by OS X to go trawling through an unsecured folder looking for fonts that WILL inevitably bring it down and of which a great many are duped in OS X for anyway.



[ Reply to This | # ]