Panther Warning: Avoid Font Book at All Costs
November 12th, 2003In my real life, I play someone who needs to be able to activate fonts on the fly, i.e. someone in a design capacity. I prefer to use an application to activate fonts, regardless of which computing platform I’m using.
For years, I’ve used Suitcase, Font Juggler and the best of the lot, Adobe Type Manager Deluxe (ATM). I still wax nostalgic for the way that ATM Deluxe auto-activated fonts. If I had neglected to activate a font, I didn’t really have to worry, as ATM would catch it. It made font management easy. It took the voodoo out of font management.
Along came Apple’s OS X. Apple, the former king of ease of use, decided to repeatedly kick both itself and it’s users squarely in the crotch (repeatedly) by having not one place for fonts to reside, but about 70 (at last count). This made font management software critical for designers. No longer could we slack on a freelance system and just drag a few fonts or folders to the System Folder. We had to watch our shit.
When Suitcase became available for OS X, everybody started cheering and things looked just swell. It supported (sort of) auto-activation, but because Adobe hates everybody except Microsoft, they forced the use of auto-activation plug-ins for their applications. Plus, the Suitcase interface left room for improvement. Because OS X has about 700 fonts activated at start up, seeing what fonts you have activated was a little weird. I’m sure readers of Slashdot or Ars Technica are ready to shoot me, but I’m going somewhere. Just bear with me, people.
Apple, obviously sensing Adobe’s shift in love (we can only blame Final Cut Pro), decided that with it’s latest system update, 10.3 nee, Panther, that it was time to once again show people how it’s done with a tantalizing font manager called Font Book. It’s Free! It has a metallic interface!
The problem is that it’s clearly meant for no one to actually use.
I added a few hundred fonts to it. It was very fast. I started to move towards my Suitcase CD to fling it into the air like I just graduated from college. Then, my machine, a dual G5 (work is nice) slowed to a crawl. I stopped my move towards the Suitcase CD. Upon further notice, I now had something like 1,900 fonts open and trying to close them all took about 45 minutes. Font Book started to respond, but then would randomly jump. Font names wouldn’t correspond with the preview. I screamed and fled.
I tried to reset everything back to normal, but when I installed Suitcase, I found that Font Book had done something with my fonts. They were gone from their original folders. Fortunately, I had a back up of my fonts and was able to overwrite the shell of a font folder.
I’m forced to ask what millions of Windows users have asked everyday, what in the name of God is Apple smoking releasing such a pile of useless crap?
Well, I’m not a professional designer so I can’t speak to that but I haven’t had ANY problems with FontBook, except that, unlike the old free-standing version, it won’t print preview sheets, and it also won’t show me font families with flippy triangles for the styles. I’ve disabled and enabled fonts on the fly without a hiccup. It also isn’t that tough to know where the different font libraries are in X and to put in each one the fonts you want. Suitcase X was a horror story. FontBook is imperfect but causes no problems (and I’ve got a piddly little G4 eMac and FontBook hasn’t slowed me at all).
After 2 years of hell with OS X trying to get fonts to work then 6 burned out hard drives after installing Panther on my Dual G4, that was then sent to the shop for 2 weeks and came back with a new motherboard, power supply, hard drive and Super Drive, I have discovered that my $1200 refurb Dell 360 2.8 Ghz workstation could do everything my Mac did and did not crash when I opened helvetica in Quark. I can also still use my Imacon Scanner with a scsi interface.
So Apple , it’s been a nice long ride and I love ya but I gotta get some work done and fucking around all day with helvetica just ain’t gonna do it.
So bye bye for now. I’ll deal with the viruses and worms. Give me a ring if you ever get your shit together.
whoooa! I installed Panther and since then, I am back to a WINDOWS state of mind … apps are blcoked, fonts render falsely, hmmm, Panther is shiot! true shiot! why would we pay for such garbage … steve jobs is a looser …. don’t bring features that bring down your system …. idiot!
FUCK… etc etc… all that is left of my neatly organised fonts, are the neatly organised folders, with no fonts in them, just to remind me how nice it used to be.
Not only that, but no version of suitcase will run on my machine now. I’m about to do a clean install, just so i can get X1 working, (as i have found it does on a virgin system)
it’s sad that apple are heading down the wrong track, designers are starting to be treated as people who couldnt get into a commerce degree.
FUCK… etc etc… all that is left of my neatly organised fonts, are the neatly organised folders, with no fonts in them, just to remind me how nice it used to be.
Not only that, but no version of suitcase will run on my machine now. I’m about to do a clean install, just so i can get X1 working, (as i have found it does on a virgin system)
it’s sad that apple are heading down the wrong track, designers are starting to be treated as people who couldnt get into a commerce degree.
Steve Jobs brags about how many people are using OS X… I think the last I heard it was only around 40%. I honestly think if shithead finally focused on Fonts in OS X that percentage would easily be 60% plus by now. FUCK! FIX the fucking FONT problem, Apple!
Maybe Apple is planning on getting out the computer market and is planning to become only a provider of mp3 players and downloadable songs? Fuck font managment for OS X, right? Let’s work on other shit!
FUCK!
I had the same problem while installing Font Folio 10. After calling Apple and being told to reinstall, I decided to fix it myself. What I did was delete every font in /Library/Fonts that had the same name as a font in /System/Library/Fonts and then restart. Everything is working fine now. Feel free to email me with any questions.
It really is a shame that font management, a critical part of overall system and application performance, is so unsolved.
It seems like Apple is more interested in pursuing “latest and greatest” instead fixing basic problems that make people’s lives really shitty every single day.
I have struggled with Fontbook, then with Suitcase 11.0.2, and now again with Fontbook. After over 100 hours spent trying to get fonts to act reasonably I’ve come to the conclusion that the best solution is to bug the shit out of Apple……..squeeky wheel theory. I hope for the sake of everybody’s benefit, that everybody that is reading all this bullshit calls Apple at least once a week to put yet another Apple techie through the paces of trying to solve a problem that really requires some reengineering. Eventually Apple will get the message that font management is more important than iSight.
Call 1-800-275-2273 now! Please!
It is SO nice to know that I’m not the only one who wants to set Font Book on fire. What a piece of shit.
I’ve been having the exact same problems on Panther! It took me a ridiculous amount of time to deactivate all my fonts and I tried to activate only the ones I couldn’t live without, I could only stand waiting for one suitcase to ‘instantly activate’… and that brought me here.
I am shocked that Apple has produced such a garbage font management system…. what about us designers?!
I just upgraded from jaguar to panther. The fonts I already had inside my user font folder have remained in their respective folders and have been added into font book. However when I now add new fonts they do, as above people have pointed out, just get all thrown into one file.
I’m so glad I found this site! I I thought it was just me because my husband always says I play too much on my mac and screw it up. I just wanted to install 1 font group (Poetica) from my old system and when that worked I was sooo happy that I got daring and tried to bring in all my old Font Folio. BIG MISTAKE!!!!
2 days later and only 20 or so fonts available but at least I’m up an running again. Still love Apple and Panther but I’m not a designer (other than some marketing for myself and some other small local groups). I’d just like a nice old LettraSet book or hard copy of my old fonts so on the rare occasion I need one I could find it without having to go through them one by one!
I have found a simple way to manage fonts using osx without font book. You simply go to your library folder, Fonts, and make an alias of the fonts folder, put that alias on your desktop and whenever you need a specific font for a job you simply copy it into that folder and it will be active. This leaves your system fonts alone and it easily actives only what you need. The only drawback is that it requires dilgence on your part in removing unnecessary fonts from that folder. If any of these fonts conflict with safari or text edit, simply remove them and those apps will work just fine.
I recommend that everyone that reads this sends feedback to apple every day. I make it a ritual to tell them how much font book sucks. maybe there will get the picture someday.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
Wow, trying to run illustrator 10 with 10.3 and over 1500 fonts to choose from with my trusty dusty 867 G4 made me want to rip out all my hair. Computer slows to a crawl and I can barely even look at anything in safari due to the fact that after I ran font book, now suitcase takes up over 70% of my memory. Hell, opening font book for the first time I quit out of it because I thought the ap locked up. Nope, it was just turning on every damn font I have on this computer.
What happens if I just use the fun drag and drop to trash with font book, empty and never look back? Any system problems with that? Does osx.3 need that application? And what good is suitcase when it can’t display of find half the fonts anyway?
Thank you guys for confirming what I was slowly realizing with horror. This is an utter disaster. I just sent some screaming feedback to apple. I have tried fontbook, font catalog, font agent pro and suitcase (latest version). I hate them all.
Use NOT the Font Book! I too was lured by the enticing concept of an Apple specific font management software, but NO! The devil rose his wicked head and f**king ATE my fonts when I deleted them from Font Book. The air turned blue around me. Co-workers shied away in horror. My hobbies now include high explosives and floor plans of the Apple Headquarters. If I ever find the idiot who created OS X, I will rip off his arm and BEAT him to death with it!
I will say it in one word: fontreservefontreserveWhatTheHellWereYouThinkingApplefontreserve
The war on terrorism must begin with Apple’s OSX font problem. Then, and only then, can we look toward a peaceful future.
Bugger . . . .
Apple won’t help me!!! I upgraded from OS8.1 to OSX Panther 10.3.3, and ALL of my Type 1 font show up as Unix Executable files when transferred to the OSX and obviously won’t load as fonts. Apple says that’s my fonts problem. They can’t help. Every file we’ve done for the last 15 years uses that set of fonts. I need them. I can’t buy ALL new fonts! If anyone has had a simmillar problem please email me.
Font Book was the reason i bought Panther….I was excited for this app, since fonts have always been my arch-enemy.
Does not work as advertised. At all. Disabling doesn’t disable. WTF?
Glad I am not alone. Lets all take a road trip to CA and knock on the door until they do something.
Font book is the worst program ever create, had about 200 fonts loaded, worked fine for a while, then tried to open it and up pops a blank font book with spinning dotted circle, just as bad as spinning beach ball of death.
Tried deleting original collection from the library and nothing works.
Apple please go back to being adobe’s little whore and take one for the team. We need Atm back!!
I’d rather suck mud out of my own ass then deal with Font Book. Apple, get your, um, shit together.
THANK YOU ALL for confirming my worst fears… I am trying to manage two computer clusters, used by about 200 students on an almost 24/7 basis (design + illustration) and font management has always been a problem. Now, it’s impossible.
I’m about 40 hours into cleaning things up. Maybe…
Oh, thank God, I thought I was losing my mind.
I have spent the last three days trying to get the IT professionals at my company to understand the value of font management. Seeing as how I am a lone Mac on an NT network, I am often looked at with a great deal of distrust anyway. They insist that I do not need Suitcase because Panther ships with a perfectly good font management utility. (I knew better; any program that automatically dumps everything into a System folder is BAD NEWS). I will definately be forwarding this link.
Bought a new G5 in January with OSX.3, but have been too busy to make the switch from my G4 9.2 system. Thank God I found this site, my plans for today were to dissect all my font folders and try to figure out this mess.
Would have been a disaster! You would think that when developing new systems, they would be tested by people using software in a real life work environments.
I do have Suitcase 10.2.2, but fonts not activated in it are still open. Yesterday I moved all the Asian fonts into a folder on my desktop, but they still come up active when I open Illus 10. I tried to locate where all these fonts reside… but I am now totally confused. HELP!
Have also had problems when downloading digital images, The system makes all kinds of extra folders and thumbnail files. I just want is to know where my files are and not have all this extra crap thrown in randomly.
My email also keeps cutting out on my new machine.
Glad I spent big money on this new apple system… I was afraid of being left behind, now I don’t want to even go there.
bogs – at least you can all get fonts into this program from hell even if you now wish you hadn’t!!! I just want ONE font (Barmeno) to show up right now… I have tried everything but the little bugger just burrows deeper and deeper into my system and has lost all those essential postscript things as well!! Wish I’d stuck with OS 9.2 now – at least I could PDF all my artwork properly and open something serious without little mad icons bouncing about all over the place. Can’t believe I have just spent £100 to f**k up my mac like this – but perhaps I’ll get a massive virus now that will sort it all out!!!