Annoying font behavior in OS X and Classic...
Okay... here is the scenario... After experiencing troubles early in the Mac OSX lifecycle I put my OS 9 on a separate partition of my hard drive. It took me a while to realize that in this arrangement there are actually two desktop folders... One in the ~user/library/desktop folder on the OSX partition, and one on the other partition under desktop... an invisible folder that only comes up on the finder. Every file saved from a classic program ends up here.
Like I said, this took a while to figure out, and no documentation in the "Scanty Bits of Knowledge" from the Help menu.
Anywqays, now I am having another problem, with those pesky fonts. First, if I boot under OS9, (not OSX running Classic) programs like Photoshop and Illustrator can use any font in the OS9 system folder . Happines! Rapture! Access to truetype and postscript fonts make me a happy boy! Birds singing... yadda, yadda, yadda...
Try the same thing in OSX and its another story. No truetype fonts... the fonts don't seem to agree with the list in OS9 system folder... Hell, they don't seem to agree with any of the other font folders, in system/library/fonts, or in user/liibrary/fonts... And not only that, but OSX programs liike textedit can read and use anything, but other programs can't...
Now I know there is some secret way of rubbing your belly and patting your head to get dingbats working under OSX (again, not mentioned in the SBOK) but there does not seem to be any consistency with accessing fonts, what they should be or where they should go...
Anyone have any ideas?
For the record, my truetype fonts have been run through truetype converter, and I did try PSTILL, but the files generated there were unusable in anything that is commerciatl (ie. not based off a UNIX background)
Am I the only one having problems with this?
Like I said, this took a while to figure out, and no documentation in the "Scanty Bits of Knowledge" from the Help menu.
Anywqays, now I am having another problem, with those pesky fonts. First, if I boot under OS9, (not OSX running Classic) programs like Photoshop and Illustrator can use any font in the OS9 system folder . Happines! Rapture! Access to truetype and postscript fonts make me a happy boy! Birds singing... yadda, yadda, yadda...
Try the same thing in OSX and its another story. No truetype fonts... the fonts don't seem to agree with the list in OS9 system folder... Hell, they don't seem to agree with any of the other font folders, in system/library/fonts, or in user/liibrary/fonts... And not only that, but OSX programs liike textedit can read and use anything, but other programs can't...
Now I know there is some secret way of rubbing your belly and patting your head to get dingbats working under OSX (again, not mentioned in the SBOK) but there does not seem to be any consistency with accessing fonts, what they should be or where they should go...
Anyone have any ideas?
For the record, my truetype fonts have been run through truetype converter, and I did try PSTILL, but the files generated there were unusable in anything that is commerciatl (ie. not based off a UNIX background)
Am I the only one having problems with this?
Comments
I like Suitcase, reads all my fonts no problem. Others like Font Reserve.
diamondsoft has a perfect font handling program, but markets it very poorly (though they are getting better). i would advise anyone who has a lot of fonts to manage professionally for output to consider fontreserve.
Since then I just install a font when I need it... Until the insanity of OSX...
All I really want to do is group my fonts into submenues, ie serif/sans/grunge etc. Do these utilities work in all programmes? Can I have different sets of fonts active, without restarting, etc.
I just got Suitcase and was playing with it. Finally I can browse through fonts and enable the ones I need for a document, without restarting the machine. The ability to see the font before actually choosing it is a real bonus. Now comes the chore of organizing my fonts properly, and trying to figure out which ones are broken (too many of mine are)
But this shall be far, far easier to do now.
And, for the record, I tried Font Reserve, both the OS9 and OSX version, and I never did get the control panel to install properly... I can phiysically see it in OS10, lying in the OS9 system control panels folder, but trying to run the OSX version always brought up a message that the control panel cannot be found.
Go figure.