Fonts Have Disappeared!

A friend of mine gave me a disk with loads and loads of fonts on which I installed on my iMac. In total this gave me something stupid like 800 fonts and it also created a number of duplicates and a number that weren't totally compatible so I have just spent the last 3 hours removing all fonts that either I didn't like, didn't display correctly/were corrupt or were invalid and got the list down to something like 280. Just as I was about to leave it at that, Font Book crashed on me and now it says I only have 67 fonts and I'm missing a couple of the ones I use all the time like Verdana.

I've looked in the trash and although there are hundreds of fonts in there I think I can only see the ones I wanted to delete.

I've rebooted my machine but I just can't seem to work out what happened to the other 200+ fonts that I wanted to keep. Where could/would they disappear to? I know I could just install them all again but that's gonna take another 3 hours to delete all the duplicates etc again and quite frankly I can't face it!

Any idea what may have happened and how to put it right?

Ahh it's done it again!!!

I installed one folders worth of fonts, went through and deleted any I didnt like then installed a second folders worth and BOOM they've all dissapeard and I'm back with 67 fonts again.

These are just free fonts that he downloaded from various websites, websites that I used myself when I was a PC user. Are Mac's more particular about their fonts compared to PC's?

Thinking about it, could I put my PC back together, back up the fonts and then whack them on the Mac or are fonts platform specific?

I would put in the trash the Font Book pref file. There's obviously a corrupted font somewhere.

Path to the file is this:

Macintosh HD -> Users -> Your Home Directory -> Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.FontBook.plist

Just drag the plist file to the trash, don't empty it right now. Restart and see if the problem is fixed. Instead of importing the whole sheebang, why not import fonts a few at a time? These are PC fonts, right? Some of them might be encoded wrong for the Mac.

I've heard of messed up fonts on the web that hosed systems...

Hmm, well I tried your suggestion and that seemed to find another 20 when I rebooted. However I the downloaded and installed Font Explorer and that found all of them with the exception that all of the ones that had been 'missing' appeared as being deactivated (In Font Book they just didn't show up at all).

The only problem I still have is that I still don't appear to have Verdana on my system. Does OSX come with this font? I know I did have it on here earlier today but I don't know if it came with one of the programs I installed or if it's part of OSX and how I would go about restoring this font anyway from the installation CD's.

Pacifist.

Mac OS X 10.4: Fonts list.

Thank you so much!! You are an absolute STAR!!

All working perfectly now and you've saved me from becoming bald just in time.

Glad it got sorted out! :girl: