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CURRENT NEWS: Corrupt fonts – what to do?


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Mac OS®: corrupt or incorrectly activated fonts can have negative influences on the Mac OS and it's running applications like QuarkXPress or InDesign. Crashes while selecting a font, overlayed characters appearing too closely or non-appearence of activated fonts in the character menu and other phenomenons are possible.

These problems occur in most cases through corrupt (copying from ZIP to floppy disc, to fileserver, to external drives etc.) or old fonts. Activated fonts on a fileserver have an incorrect file-finder flag setting, and thus cannot be activated. These flags provide the Mac OS with the status of a document like "write protected" or "in use". Additionally, unused fonts should be removed from the font directory and fonts like "Helvetica" should be replaced.

"FontDoctor" can be used to solve many of these problems by allowing you to analyse fonts for corruption and clean the font cache, where information about utilized fonts is kept. It can be even necessary to clear all Operating System caches and reset on start-up. Tools like "Font Finangler", "Onyx" or "Tinker Tool System" help there.

Should a font be font be irreparably damaged, the only solution is the backup from the media where the font is stored. The use of professional font management tools like FontReserve or Suitcase is strongly recommended, because these applications prevent double activation of fonts or open a copy to protect the original.