In the last two weeks I’ve been struggling with a problem on Firefox. Text formatted differently (say a word in bold in the middle of regular text) would tend to clog together. And don’t even tell me about forms, text in forms, as you write, would just become a huge mess. The cursor wouldn’t follow the end of the text, and the letters appear one over the other, when they appear at all.
Oddly enough, I couldn’t see this behavior in any other application. Not in Opera, not in Safari, not anywhere else.
In ad desperate attempt to regain control of my Mac, I opened a new account for me and started to rebuild my environment and, eventually, the problem started to happen again.
I could track down that the problem was related to font installation.
I’ll spare you some dirty details, but here is what happened. Accidentally, when I was installing the fonts, I installed some windows native fonts that I had on my font directory (don’t ask me why!) that are also present on MacOS.
I think this may be old news to some seasoned Mac users, but I thought of sharing because it might be useful to someone.
Because Fontbook uses a more advanced library system than windows, both versions os the font were installed at the same time. Now, because the fonts are different implementations, kerning tables and other stuff don’t exactly match and everything becomes a mess depending on wich version of regular, bold, italic, etc the system is using.
Fortunately Fontbook as a solution for this. Duplicated fonts are show with a dot on the right. You can highlight the font name and go to Edit>Resolve Duplicates. With this Fontbook selects a version and disables the other.
Just one last thing. Don’t trust this blindly. It happened to me, that a Bold version was selected with the regular font of other one, and some problems still occurred. So I had to manually check the versions in order to have all variations from the same implementation.
Has anyone been thought this?
Guilherme
is a Web Designer focused on web standards and the web ahead of us.
4 Comments
Debes conseguir (tucows.com9
el programa TTConverter, que pasa las fuentes TT de una plataforma a la otra. (Si son Mac a PC y viceversa).
I continue to have problems and have eliminated all duplicates. This really sucks because part of my job is demonstrating and training on wikis, and my problem is worst in dialog boxes.
Also, have you tried Luis’s suggestion, TTConverter? Review?
@Frymaster Speck - removing duplicate fonts has worked for me, so I haven’t tried the font converted. AFAIK, MacOS seems to handle True Type fonts correctly, so i didn’t bother to convert them.
What brings a lot of trouble is to install two versions of the same font, being them True Type or not and sometimes, even when you solve duplicates you may end up with a bold of a version and the regular version of another, this still breaks everything anyway.
After I found out what had happened, I actually had to go font by font, among the duplicates, and make consistent changes so no two versions were mixed.
That was very, very annoying, but on the end, it payed off because everything went normal again :-)
Just another thing, depending on how your user installs fonts, it may happen that default fonts are installed as System fonts and the duplicates as user fonts, so you may still have mixed fonts that are not in the same user level.
@Frymaster Speck - Have you tried to see if this problem occurs when you are logged as a different user.
When I first have this problem I was installing fonts in user space and then when I switched users I found everything was fine. This is how I figured out what was happening.
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