OSX font help

21 Feb 2006

I managed to screw up the fonts on my PowerBook. I grabbed an archive I have of a few hundred fonts and opened it up in Font Book to view them. Font Book did the helpful (and unexpected) thing and installed all the fonts for me despite the fact that this caused me to have two or three versions of some common fonts like Helvetica.

After cleaning up the fonts and resolving duplicates, both Firefox and Thunderbird have stopped displaying a number of characters including accented characters, some curly quotes, and em dashes. It doesn’t matter what font I use, I get a series of characters (like the copyright symbol) instead of the expected character.

When I open the same message in Mail.app or the same web page in Safari they work fine. Apparently only Moz tools are affected by this.

Any ideas?

Graham
February 21, 2006 11:13 PM

I had a similar problem after similarly installing a big chunk of fonts. I got everything to work again on Firefox by deleting all my fonts except the system ones and restarting.

I haven’t found a way to delete any fonts with duplicate names that I try to install, using Font Book or fontexplorerx.

Loyd
February 22, 2006 6:25 AM

I had the same issue. I installed the free application from LinoType. FontExplorerX, that Graham speaks of and let it organize the fonts for me. My PowerBook works fine after that. I’m able to easily administrate the fonts also.

Good luck.

Hugh
February 22, 2006 3:34 PM

I’ve had the same experience as Loyd with FontExplorerX. Let us know if it works for you.

Jason Cross
April 11, 2006 8:58 AM

Are there only a certain number of fonts that you can have enabled on the mac? Reason being is that I have fonts that are currently enabled in Font Book but I can’t access the fonts in any of my applications, i.e. Flash, Photoshop, Word…

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