Intermittent Erratic Fonts

[skoorbb]

VW9.5/OS10.1.4

How does VW access fonts in OS10?

Intermittently, when opening a file, some fonts appear pixellated, but identify correctly (as-drawn) in the pull-down font menu when selected. They print erratically.

Fonts are in the correct folders in OS10.

Solution below posted by MattG way back appears to be the closest related issue:

"The solution for this is to remove all fonts that begin with the same name from the font folder. Then add back the missing font, and then add back the rest of the font family.

So in the case of Arial, you would remove all of the Arial fonts. Add Arial back to your font folder, then add the other Arial based fonts back in."

The answer above does not appear to be the solution in this case.

[Guest]

Are the fonts pixellated in the drawing (on the screen), or elsewhere?

[Matthew Giampapa]

Bruce, that was to work around a windows bug where adding fonts in a certain order would cause a font to permanently drop out of the font list. (This was a windows only issue)

We have seen a bunch of problems with older fonts on OS X when they do not conform 100% to the true type standard.

Apparently MacOS X is very picky about what fonts it will play nicely with. If you have any old fonts that you have just been copying from Mac to Mac, try removing them and contacting the manufacturer to see if a more up to date version is available. (Just like any software, there are usually bug fix release to fonts as well)

We have seen this problem in particular with Tekton and Mr. Hand.

[skoorbb]

Fonts are pixellated on screen, and print as some kind of new jumbled ai font that gives our graphic designer pause.....

[skoorbb]

Problem is occuring most frequently with:

C Univers 57 Condensed & Stencil.

[skoorbb]

We use post script fonts almost exclusively on drawings.

Frutiger 57 Cn is also subject to this problem.

Worksheets are unreadable.

[Guest]

What type of font is this? (True Type, Bitmap, etc)

[skoorbb]

Any conclusion?

does NNA publish a list of "approved" fonts? PS or otherwise?

Thanks.

[Guest]

There are some PS fonts that need to be updated when using OS 10. If you are using an older version of the font, you should get a new and updated version.

We've seen this happen and once the fonts have been updated, they appear fine.

[skoorbb]

We will and have updated our fonts, but that doesn't appear to be the whole solution, as some machines work Ok with a font and some don't. Fonts for both were originially copied from the same Admin folder. One difference appears to be between OS9 and OS10, with the OS10 having most of the trouble.

OS10 keeps fonts in (3) places:

System/Library/Fonts

Library/Fonts

Users/"User Name"/Library/Fonts

Back to one of the original questions in this thread - How does VW access fonts in OS10? and that answer may inform us where fonts utilized by VW should be placed....or, maybe it doesn't matter.

[Guest]

To answer your question:

VW uses standard font API's to get the list of fonts on a system. We do not search any directories, rather we ask the OS for the fonts it knows about.

OS10 also searches for fonts in the OS9 system font folder.

Have you tried this under OS 10.2?

[skoorbb]

No, we have not "upgraded" to 10.2 yet.....between operating systems and VW upgrades in the year past, we've become software junkies, unable to produce a consistent product. Hopefully, some combination of an OS and VW will be stable and productive enough to let us sette down for a while.

Just wanted to confirm that VW didn't access fonts some unknown way.

Thanks.