Troubleshooting font installations: more info

We have received several replies of interest regarding our recent item on "Helvetica font: PostScript vs. TrueType issues."

Will Parker (Software Test Engineer for the Macintosh Business Unit) replies:

Per our tests, Mac OS X Carbon applications can experience problems any time one of the font folders available in Mac OS X contains more than one copy of a font that has the same name. The problem is not confined to conflicts between PostScript and TrueType fonts. We are treating this as an OS bug, and have reported it to Apple. Also, please note that having the same font in two or more different font folders does not trigger the problem.

For example, one of our customers had managed to collect two font suitcases with different names, both of which contained the same font, in his Mac OS 9 Fonts folder. This was causing misbehavior in our applications as well as Carbon apps from other vendors. The problem cleared up after he removed one of the copies.

Another common source of the problem is when users install their OS 9 fonts in an OS X Fonts folder that already contain a version of the font, inadvertently triggering this duplicate bug.

We have been able to generate the same misbehavior in Mac OS X Carbon apps by creating multiple suitcases containing known-good copies of the same font and placing them into any of the following folders:

• The Fonts folder in the System Folder of Mac OS 9
• /Library/Fonts
• /Users/<Username>/Library/Fonts

We have not tested for the bug in "/System/Library/Fonts", as this directory is reserved for Apple's own system-critical fonts, but presumably the problem could also be triggered by doing the same there.

Richard Spensley writes:

"One of the main problems that I had was with Helvetica and the fact that Suitcase would always prefer to open the OS X System Helvetica.dfont instead of the massive PostScript suitcase of Type 1 fonts that I have that contain all sorts of Helvetica fonts and weights. In the end I removed Helvetica.dfont from the OS X System by logging in as root and moving it to a 'disabled' folder. However, I could not replace it with Helvetica PostScript version because MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint all crashed on startup when this font was active. What I had to do in the end was activate Helvetica PostScript font using Suitcase whenever I needed it and de-activate it whenever I wanted to launch any of the MS suite. I can, however, re-activate the Helvetica PostScript font once the MS app I want to use has launched."

Another reader adds:

"Fonts can be extremely tough on the eyes when viewed in Word X. However, if you output that file to a PDF, it looks beautiful. Why? The reason is that Microsoft has been avoiding converting their font render code to ATSUI."