Troubleshooting MS Office font issues with Suitcase

In response to our previous report a conflict between with Suitcase, Microsoft Office applications, and PostScript fonts, Jim Royal confirms the behavior and offers this workaround. He writes:

"I use only PostScript fonts for publishing work. Under Mac OS 9, I always removed Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol, and Zapf Dingbats from the System Folder, and I used the PostScript versions instead, managed by Adobe Type Manager. Under OS X, ATM does not exist, so I use Suitcase, which has an option to override System fonts if it encounters a duplicate. However, Suitcase (or the OS X font manager) does not handle duplicates correctly.

If I have duplicate fonts installed -- TrueType/TrueType or TrueType/PostScript -- I get severe instability in various Microsoft apps, and even in Suitcase itself. Often Microsoft applications will routinely quit while launching. If I highlight a duplicate font in Suitcase's own list, Suitcase will suddenly quit, and upon restarting the application, Suitcase marks the duplicate font as damaged, which is incorrect.

My solution is to remove the duplicate System fonts. I have removed the TrueType versions of Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol, and Zapf Dingbats from the System/Library/Fonts folder. Suitcase provides my system with the PostScript equivalents. The exception is Helvetica, which refused to work reliably at all in Suitcase. I have placed that PostScript font in my System/Library/Fonts folder. (I had to log in as root to make these changes, of course.)

After I moved the fonts, the stability of my Microsoft applications improved, but occasional unexpected quits remained. Next I decided to remove all duplicate fonts from the entire system, pulling duplicates of Arial, Geneva, Monaco, Times New Roman, and Verdana from various locations, leaving only one copy of each font. Since I am using Microsoft Outlook 2001 for email, I elected to have the sole copies of these fonts live in my Classic System Folder. My OS X applications can still see these fonts, and Suitcase and my Microsoft applications have stopped crashing.

I am unsure about the advisability of yanking so many fonts out of the System/Library/Fonts folder. Extensis advises against it, but it is the only I found to make my system stable."

Note: When attempting to track down duplicate files, keep in mind (as Jim noted above) that OS X automatically provides access to the fonts contained in the OS 9 System Folder used by Classic.