I tried adding 300 fonts in FontBook... bad move
It totally hosed my machine for a while. Firstly it ground my machine to a halt, so I suspected it was activating the fonts instead of just loading them. It was. No problem. I'll just deactivate them as I go through them. It takes about 30 seconds (on a 933MHz G4 with 1GB RAM) to deactivate a font. Grrr. Then it just locked up my machine hard. Couldn't force quit, no other apps were coming up or starting and I couldn't even log out or restart. I hit the manual restart. Every thing came up fine but there were 1200 fonts in my user font folder that I then deleted. I'm back to normal but now I have to wait for Suitcase X1 to work with Panther or FontBook to get smart.
1. Font book should not activate fonts by default when you add them!
2. Activation/deactivation of fonts should be fairly quick.
3. Don't just spin the
ing beachball when I add a folder of dozens of fonts. Give us a progress bar.
Interface is great, it just doesn't work right. Maybe I have to go through all my fonts and update the older ones but they worked fine in Suitcase X under Jaguar...
Anyone have any tips or good experiences handling a large number of fonts with FontBook?
1. Font book should not activate fonts by default when you add them!
2. Activation/deactivation of fonts should be fairly quick.
3. Don't just spin the
ing beachball when I add a folder of dozens of fonts. Give us a progress bar.Interface is great, it just doesn't work right. Maybe I have to go through all my fonts and update the older ones but they worked fine in Suitcase X under Jaguar...
Anyone have any tips or good experiences handling a large number of fonts with FontBook?
Comments
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...light=fontbook
Yeah, it's $90 but it's everything ATM Deluxe was...and more.
Anyone using over, say, 50 fonts should consider this.
I was bummed that Panther's FontBook wasn't a little more up to snuff. I was hoping for great things, and for the average, consumer user I'm sure it is.
But there's no way I'm going to attempt to load my ridiculously thick typeface collection into it.
Correction. It is a new file but they still have the patch notice up. Don't quite understand that.
Example. When I am using TextEdit and I have the Font tool palette open, will this be Font Agent Pro or FontBook?
Originally posted by New
Hey Outsider, you posted in the other thread, what the hell made you try that stunt with 300 fonts anyway?
I heard horror stories with people trying to manage 1000's of fonts. I figured 300 would be easy as pie. Guess not... Tonight I will try 50 of my most basic fonts, see if that's any better.
I installed the other fonts one by one. I wonder how many people really need that many fonts? I seem to use the same half dozen all of the time. My office mandates that we use New Times Roman (argh) for everything official.
I just find myself scrolling through fonts, not know knowing what I am looking for and wouldn't probably know it if I found it. I don't know how you pros have the patience to root through that many options or notice the small nuances of fonts that seemingly look the same to me.
FontBook is for average users, who have tens of fonts, not hundreds or thousands. If you have that many fonts, then you need to start using font managing software.
My second note is that FontBook is not the cause of most people's problems, it is the fonts you are trying to manage. MacOS X does not deal with some font issues that MacOS 9 handled well (the reverse is also true). People are bringing clumps of very damaged fonts in from OS 9 and seeing problems, then blaming them on FontBook. This is actually a problem that is just being exposed by FontBook.
We had some problems on an overloaded computer here. So I use FontDoctor, and striped out the bad fonts... now things run much better.
You can blame corrupt fonts for FontBook crashes, but corrupt fonts are hardly a new problem, so you'd think that FontBook would at least be able to identify fonts as corrupt rather than trusting them implicitly. It could even leave repair to a third party app - the point is that given that corrupt fonts are a common problem, and given the severity of the crashes that a corrupt font causes, you'd think that Apple would have put a safeguard in. They need to. This strikes me as the most basic precaution, and something that the app should not have been released without (then again, the iTunes for Windows folks made the same mistake with corrupt MP3s).
The rest sounds a lot like a particularly painful version of the old "make it work, then make it fast" mantra, or of the sort of lack of polish characteristic of a 1.0 release. Adding and removing fonts works, but Apple presumably has some work to do in order to make it fast.