MacOS X corrupts Fonts!!!???

Our studio has just simultaneously upgraded to MacOSX, Quark 6, Acrobat 6 and Suitcase 11. And have we got problems!

Fonts which are fine on one Mac either can't be seen in the Suitcase preview (and therefore disappear in Quark documents), and now some subsets of the fonts are appearing solely as foreign character substitutes! Just Garamond Bold and Bold Italic out of the whole font! Why!!!???

Suitcase says the font isn't corrupted. I install the original font from the CD and the same thing happens. Instinct tells me this is either a system or Suitcase problem... but I can't solve it, I'm losing time to deadlines, and slowly going nuts.

Help!!!

Suitcase and Quark are not very good for OS X.. well Quark is not very good period How are you transferring the fonts from mac to mac since some fonts are ok on different macs...

Yes, this is where you go, "oh, hmm..better get rid of quark." And as for the suitcase....well....hmmm....my fonts work fine?......?....yeah....I don't know...it shouldn't do that.....I expect it from quark, but not from suitecase necisarily, though I haven't really used it much at all.

Well being a print management studio we don't have any option but to use Quark, and Quark 6.0 now as one of our clients has been providing documents in that format.

I'd love us to have InDesign as an option but the budget was being stretched at the £3000 it cost to get Quark 6 alone for the entire studio...

Isn't there a Quark to InDesign converter? Yeah that is an extreme price.. too bad there wasnt an even larger shop that you could send hte Quark file to, to have it converted then just use Indesign.. I havent had any problems with fonts, good luck with this.

have you tried using Fontbook with Quark? Does it do the same thing?

hype.it said:

have you tried using Fontbook with Quark? Does it do the same thing?

Click to expand...

When we converted to OSX tried using fontbook in a production environment and it was a total waste of time with quark and other apps. So ended up buying Suitcase, which still has problems but was a dream compared with fontbook.

Ok.. I know with suitcase and quark on mac os x, together they work like a dream but they do have conflicts. Try upgrading to Quark 6.1, it's free and solves many issues. For one it's much more stable.

http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/61update.html
http://www.extensis.com/en/downloads/index.jsp

wow! been away all this time and no witeshark.... must be ill

Been having the identical problem as Shaqui... with a twist: The Suitcase X1 HELP utility displays all the text characters as tiny rectangular boxes! (Is this Extensis humor?) The 'gibberish' character set issue has, at least, gone away. I envy anyone who's had "no problem" with fonts in OSX, Quark 6.0, Font Book, Suitcase, younameit. I had pinned my hopes on John Kerry and Font Doctor to fix things up. Right! We are an in-plant prep dept. with lots of fonts coming and going -- I'm sure that doesn't help. Any ideas anyone?

Sorry I can't help with Quark etc but just a quick note about fonts for others.
OSX cannot use the old bitmapped fonts from OS9 and earlier.
OSX uses True Type, Post Script type 1 and Open Type which was developed by MS & Adobe and are common on Windows machines.
Downloading the old Mac fonts is a waste of time, try the Windows ones
Take Care

Well.... answered my own question. When in doubt, call tech support. A caffeinated young lady at Extensis told me to empty the OSX Library Fonts folders, search and trash AdobeFNT files, and download and run a utility to delete font caches. Oh, uh, and restart. We're all smiles here.

If Quark was as bad as you all say it is, the industry wouldn't be using it primarily for so many years. I've never had any problems with it.

I think she/he is speaking of the current version. I have read in many places that version six is not worth the upgrade and that many people are moving to Indesign.

pedrothekevin said:

If Quark was as bad as you all say it is, the industry wouldn't be using it primarily for so many years. I've never had any problems with it.

Click to expand...

Here is a problem.
Try using "outline" in the fonts pallette. The centers of the fonts are no longer white they become transparent (seen on a color background). See my posting. This happens only on Macs OSX with Quark 6.0 & 6.1 with all updates installed too. Quark has duplicated this problem and at this time have no answers. Works fine on a PC.
If you select "shadow" all is as it should be. I use Quark religiously too in the printing industry. I love it but there is always a bug! They are soo obvious too!